Podcasts about ecommerce

On today's Lunch with Norm, we talk with Shanif Dhanani, the CEO of Apteo on new ways to use AI and how to improve your customer retention and journey. In this episode, find out how to use A.I. to predict what customers are going to do next and how you can send customers personalized messages based on their interests. Shanif helps eCommerce brands personalize their marketing campaigns by predicting what their customers will buy next. Prior to Apteo, he was the lead engineer and head of analytics at TapCommerce, an NYC-based ad-tech startup that was acquired by Twitter. This episode is brought to you by Startup Club Startup Club is the largest club on Clubhouse supporting the Startup ecosystem. Startup Club offers an exciting sense of belonging to established and aspiring entrepreneurs, startup businesses, and companies wanting to Learn, Connect, and Grow. Join us for conversations with founders, entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists, subject matter experts, and more.For More information visit https://Startup.club In this episode, Apteo's Shanif Dhanani is here to talk about new ways to use AI and how to improve your customer retention and journey.  We find out the new ways Amazon and eCom brands are utilizing  A.I. to predict customers and how you can too!   This episode is brought to you by Startup Club.

Do you know how many people talk to me about how much they'd like to have an ecommerce store? Unfortunately, there's always some sort of “but” involved in the conversation.As in:  I have dreamed of selling products online for years, BUT… …I've got little kids—where would I find the time?…I don't even know what I'd sell. …where would I get the money? …I've never run a business before.I could go on and on and on.  What I've learned from these conversations about starting online stores…and the reasons why people say they can't…is that oftentimes people seem to need PERMISSION to live their dreams. It sounds silly, right? I mean, we're adults! But at the end of the day, people—maybe even you—need someone to say, “You have the right and the permission to go after your dreams. Whatever your age or situation or background may be, you can do this…and I can even show you how.” This episode shares one of my “aha” moments—and tells you about why I've written my new e-book, Permission to Sell.  As you listen, I hope you have an “aha” moment of your own. Additional Resources Connect with Alison:Facebook: @alisonjprinceInstagram: @alisonjprince>>>Download my free e-book, Permission to Sell, here.Get your free Because I Can planner here (you just pay shipping.)Click here to join the $0-100k System!

Try Privy for FREE today Get your copy of The Ultimate 2022 Ecommerce Holiday Calendar Check out Privy Masterclass Try The Shopify Store Grader Check out The Ecommerce Marketing Playlist Join The Ecommerce Marketing Community Check out our book, The Ecommerce Marketing Handbook Get your free copy of Ecommerce Marketing Recipes Ecommerce Marketing School is sponsored by soona and #paid.

The world is changing at a pace that's hard to keep up with. So, what a student learns to earn a degree is quickly becoming obsolete. That's true unless you're in Anika Sharma's class. Anika is a professor of business and technology at NYU Stern School of Business, and she is also a General Manager and Global Client Partner for Mindtree. By having her feet in both worlds, Anika sees how Gen Z is changing in real-time and understands what brands are asking for on a day-to-day basis. She then shares that information in educational and business settings. She shared it with us, too, on this episode. Tune in to learn:How Anika brings the classroom to clients at Mindtree (7:30)Trends larger brands are looking for help with (10:50)Getting more to the heart of why companies fail and what we can learn from them (30:30)Up Next in Commerce is brought to you by Salesforce Commerce Cloud. Learn more at http://www.salesforce.com/commerce Mission.org is a media studio producing content for world-class clients. Learn more at http://www.mission.org.

96 - The Email Einsteins are back in the lab again. This time with a special guest, Emily Ryan! She's a self-proclaimed email geek with nearly a decade of experience heading up her email marketing agency, Westfield Creative. Join Vira and Emily for a dive deep into the dos and don'ts of email design. We cover everything from font sizes, to button spacing, to the pros and cons of plain text. If you're building out your email templates and looking for advice, this episode is for you! Let's get into it. 

eCommerce business models have grown in complexity exponentially. The channels such as Amazon and Walmart are always modifying their rules and business models. And it's hard for eCommerce brands to keep up with these regulations and have KPIs aligned with the changed regulations. If they are not aligned and measured, the brands may experience significant financial consequences. But most of these eCommerce platforms are targeted at a specific audience that might be on QuickBooks and may have under $5 mil in revenue. So what challenges can you expect once you grow past $5 mi in revenue? In today's episode, we invited a panel of cross-functional experts for a live interview on LinkedIn who brings significant expertise to discuss Skubana Detailed Independent Review. We discussed their strength and weaknesses and where they might fit in the eCommerce architecture. Finally, we discussed their exit strategy and market positioning, where they are the best fit, and where they might struggle.For more information on growth strategies for SMBs using ERP and digital transformation, visit our community at wbs.rocks or elevatiq.com. To ensure that you never miss an episode of the WBS podcast, subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform.

Welcome to a special cross-over episode of the podcast.  We're taking a break for the week and bringing you a great conversation Michael had on The Voice of Retail podcast with best-selling author Dan Pink. Dan believes that regret is our most misunderstood emotion.In his quest to reclaim the power of regret as a force for good, Dan has written a breakthrough book, The Power Of Regret, which speaks to regret as a critical component of human existence. This emotion prompts us to look backwards to clarify how we want to move forwards. I loved the book, enjoyed the interview, and appreciate Dan's remarkable take on regret and I'm delighted to share it with you.And don't forget, if you live in the US or Canada you can get the Kindle version of my book Remarkable Retail: How to Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Digital Disruption for just $1.99 for a very limited time. Just head on over to Amazon.We'll be back next week with our regularly scheduled show.But for now, let's listen to Michael's interview with Dan Pink.Michael's first interview with Dan About Daniel PinkDaniel H. Pink is the author of several provocative, bestselling books about business, work, creativity, and behavior.His books include:When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing unlocks the scientific secrets to good timing to help you flourish at work, at school, and at home. When spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list. It was also a Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today bestseller. Several outlets (including Amazon, iBooks, and Goodreads) named it one of the best non-fiction books of 2018.  It is being translated into 33 languages.To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, which uses social science to offer a fresh look at the art and science of sales. To Sell is Human was a #1 bestseller on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post lists and has been translated into 34 languages. More than a dozen outlets, from Amazon.com to The Washington Post, selected it as one of the best books of the year. It also won the American Marketing Association's Berry Book Prize as the year's best book on marketing.Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, which draws on 50 years of behavioral science to overturn the conventional wisdom about human motivation. Along with being a Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly bestseller, Drive spent 159 weeks on the New York Times (main and extended) bestseller lists. A national bestseller in Japan and the United Kingdom, the book has been translated into 40 languages.A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, which charts the rise of right-brain thinking in modern economies and describes the six abilities individuals and organizations must master in an outsourced, automated age. A Whole New Mind was on the New York Times (main and extended) bestseller lists for 96 weeks over four years. It has been a Freshman Read at several U.S. colleges and universities. In 2008, Oprah Winfrey gave away 4,500 copies of the book to Stanford University's graduating class when she was the school's commencement speaker.The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need, the first American business book in the Japanese comic format known as manga and the only graphic novel ever to become a BusinessWeek bestseller. Illustrated by award-winning artist Rob Ten Pas, The Adventures of Johnny Bunko was named an American Library Association best graphic novel for teens.Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself, a Washington Post bestseller that Publishers Weekly says “has become a cornerstone of employee-management relations.” In 2013, the U.S. Department of Labor and the Library of Congress selected Free Agent Nation as one of 100 Books That Shaped Work in America.Pink was host and co-executive producer of “Crowd Control,” a television series about human behavior on the National Geographic Channel that aired in more than 100 countries. He has appeared frequently on NPR, PBS, ABC, CNN, and other TV and radio networks in the US and abroad.He has been a contributing editor at Fast Company and Wired as well as a business columnist for The Sunday Telegraph. His articles and essays have also appeared in The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The New Republic, Slate, and other publications. He was also a Japan Society Media fellow in Tokyo, where he studied the country's massive comic industry.Before venturing out on his own 20 years ago, Dan worked in several positions in politics and government, including serving from 1995 to 1997 as chief speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore.He received a BA from Northwestern University, where he was a Truman Scholar and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a JD from Yale Law School. He has also received honorary doctorates from Georgetown University, the Pratt Institute, the Ringling College of Art and Design, the University of Indianapolis, and Westfield State University.Pink and his wife live in Washington, DC. They are the parents of two recent college graduates and a college freshman.Buy the book:   https://www.chapters.indigo.ca/en-ca/books/the-power-of-regret-how/9780735210653-item.html?ikwid=the+power+of+regret&ikwsec=Home&ikwidx=0#algoliaQueryId=6502f49431a758699c7276ecce7d1ae6Our previous interview on The Voice of Retail :  https://the-voice-of-retail.simplecast.com/episodes/tal-zvi-nathanel-ceo-of-showfields-and-dan-pink-nyt-best-selling-author-share-their-insights-on-retail-experience-working-and-adapting-in-the-covid-19-ear About UsSteve Dennis is an advisor, keynote speaker and author on strategic growth and business innovation. You can learn more about Steve on his       website.    The expanded and revised edition of his bestselling book  Remarkable Retail: How To Win & Keep Customers in the Age of Disruption is now available at  Amazon or just about anywhere else books are sold. Steve regularly shares his insights in his role as a      Forbes senior contributor and on       Twitter and       LinkedIn. You can also check out his speaker "sizzle" reel      here.Michael LeBlanc  is the Founder & President of M.E. LeBlanc & Company Inc and a Senior Advisor to Retail Council of Canada as part of his advisory and consulting practice.   He brings 25+ years of brand/retail/marketing & eCommerce leadership experience, and has been on the front lines of retail industry change for his entire career.  Michael is the producer and host of a network of leading podcasts including Canada's top retail industry podcast,       The Voice of Retail, plus  Global E-Commerce Tech Talks  ,      The Food Professor  with Dr. Sylvain Charlebois and now in its second season, Conversations with CommerceNext!  You can learn more about Michael   here  or on     LinkedIn. Be sure and check out Michael's latest venture for fun and influencer riches - Last Request Barbecue,  his YouTube BBQ cooking channel!  

The North American inbound supply chain was well-run and extremely cheap before the pandemic brought disruption to the logistics and transportation space. Since the pandemic, the shipping industry had to adapt and is still adapting to this uncertainty. Prices are going up, congestion is at an all-time high, and these we won't recover from these challenges overnight. Join Joe Lynch as he talks to John Murnane about the disruption in container logistics. John is a senior partner at McKinsey & Company. At McKinsey, he is the leader of the logistics sector. So he covers everything from air & ocean carriers to warehousing & fulfillment. Listen and learn more about the shipping industry, shipper & carrier relationships, sustainability, end-to-end shipping, and much more. Find out about the disruption in container logistics and how it can be solved. Disruption In Container Logistics With John Murnane Thank you so much for joining us. Our topic is disruption and container logistics with my friend, John Murnane. How is it going, John.  I am doing great. Thanks for having me. How are you? Excellent. I am glad we are talking about this topic. Please introduce yourself, your company, and where you are? I am a Senior Partner at McKinsey. I am based in Atlanta. I lead McKinsey's Logistics Sector globally with a colleague named Martin Joerss, who is based in Hamburg. Tell us what you guys do over in that McKinsey's Logistics Practice. We call it a sector, but we serve the logistics industry. For us, that is all the different, interesting, fascinating parts of logistics throughout the global supply chain, ocean and air carriers, forwarders, folks doing container leasing, and Marine services. We do a lot of work in ground handling and transport, terminal operators, and rail trucks, both asset-based and brokerage. We also do a lot of work in the warehouse and fulfillment. I serve companies that operate fulfillment, real estate, and industrial developer. We also do Last Mile post and parcel returns, plus all the folks that are in and around that space doing data, transparency, tech, robotics, and all the fascinating, fun companies that are trying to knit it all together. Do you work more with shippers or the actual logistics providers? We work with both. In the group I lead, the logistics sector, we serve companies that make a living in moving stuff around. I have got a number of colleagues in a practice that is adjacent to ours that are in manufacturing and supply chain. Those consultants and partners serve the big retailers and manufacturers who pay to have the goods moved. I do not know what you guys did at McKinsey but it was not so long ago that there was no logistics practice. It was logistics and supply chain or supply chain and logistics or manufacturing supply chain and logistics. It was always the tail end of something else. We have arrived because we have a McKinsey partner who is responsible for watching over us. We have got 100 McKenzie partners that I do not know if we are responsible for it. [caption id="attachment_7990" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Container Logistics Disruption: The pandemic hit the shipping industry in many ways. People started buying a lot more, which meant more containers being moved while the staff was low. There was just a lot of congestion.[/caption]   The business needs some babysitters. Tell us a little bit about you. Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? Give us some career highlights before you joined McKinsey. I grew up in California, pretty close to the ports of LA and Long Beach, but did not get into logistics. At a young age, I was a Mechanical Engineer at Duke. I worked in entertainment for many years at Disney and the NBA in finance and design roles, which was a lot of fun. It is not as entertaining as logistics. When I got into logistics, it was at McKinsey. I went to Business School at Michigan and then I joined McKinsey. You joke about logistics being the end. I got recruited into the travel and logistics practice because I knew a thing or two about travel. I started serving logistics companies back in the day. This is 2003 or 2004. It was not sexy. Logistics was not quite as hot as it is now, but I found the work fascinating. I liked the people. I got into rail, parcel, and trucking, and then I moved to South America to lead our logistics practice. I was in Chile for three years and then I got into the ocean space and Marine terminals. I have been hooked ever since. It has become more fascinating given all the things that we have seen in the last years, from the eCommerce boom to automation to the push for sustainability and what happened with the pandemic. It is fantastic that you have got that South America experience because I feel like we have had so much stuff in China for so long. I have nothing against China, but it makes more sense to ship stuff from Mexico or South America in general. We do not do nearly that much business with our South American partners who we fully understand compared to China. There are lots of bags coming in and out in a lot of air freight. I was in Chile, which does a lot of flowers and salmon, and exports a ton of copper and minerals. Let's talk about our topic, which is the disruption in container logistics. Why don't you take us back to before there was this disruption? Talk about what was going on in the space back in the day? You hear a lot about underinvestment in infrastructure and “failing” logistics infrastructure in the US. Many years ago, things were working well. If you were a manufacturer or a consumer, you probably had the lowest cost supply chain in the world that was able to get you products from anywhere in the world any time. The cost was quite low and the supply chain runs very well. It is smooth. As such, it was something that a lot of people took for granted. It seemed very opaque compared to now. Many years ago, if you were moving freight, your stuff disappeared into the ocean for three weeks or a month. There is also opaque because no one has looked into it. We have all learned how important it is. I used to serve clients and I did a lot of marketing and sales work, helping people with sales and pricing. I serve clients in logistics. I remember hearing sales executives complain to me. I can't make these value-based arguments. I can't talk about our value prop because I can't get access to anyone that matters. Ten years ago, people had a well-ran, extremely cheap North American inbound supply chain. And they took it for granted. I am talking to a procurement leader four levels down and they do not care about our value. It was opaque because, to some extent, there was not engagement on this topic at the highest levels, and certainly, there is now. Many years ago, you had a well-run, extremely cheap North American inbound supply chain. The infrastructure did not get bad overnight. The pandemic hit us in three ways. One is we all started buying a lot more stuff. We did not spend any less. We stopped spending on travel and restaurants. No new car, no vacation, but I can buy crap online. I can upgrade my house. I did some of that myself. I am in the house more and I invest in doing some things around the house. I got an indoor bike to stay in shape, but we spent 20% more money on stuff. I always call it not your grandparents or great-grandparents pandemic. In the 1920 pandemic, 50 million people died worldwide and there was poverty. We joke that the COVID-19 or 20 that we gained from sitting around eating and buying stuff. That is not to discount all of the misery that it brought, but most of the misery was isolation for us. When you have a situation where there is more volume being purchased, that means more containers and more trucks move. At the same time, global capacity fell by about 14% or 15% over a similar timeframe. If you have been paying attention, that probably feels intuitive. We had people that were sick so we could not stack. We had operations that were shut down at times. We had congestion because people were stacking and storing containers because they could not get them to the next place and they were waiting and also every stage in the value chain. We all saw the earnings releases that talked about, “I am 65% short of the team. I need to operate these warehouses.” They are open, but they are not running anywhere near full capacity. If it is 20% up in demand and 15% down in supply, you have got a congestion problem. On top of it, those increases weren't smooth. If those increases were smooth, our logistics industry might have had a chance, but it was overnight, then it stopped and started again. That made for some challenging times, and you ended up getting what you got, which is pretty poor service, long lines, congestion, delays, and uncertainty where things were. You also have price increases because the companies that were moving the goods were trying to manage to make sure that they were at least taking good care of the clients that were willing to pay the most. It became challenging for our shippers. I do not think it hit the biggest shippers, the Home Depots or the Lowe's. Those guys had contracted rates. They call them the bat phone when they call the shipping companies. They did not all of a sudden get double or triple the cost of a container. They were okay. It was a lot of the other smaller players. You mentioned this spike 20% up in demand, 15% less in capacity, but if you were 20% or 30% off in your headcount in your consulting practice, you could address that internally because you are all a team. This was across a whole bunch of supply chains that are spread out across the world. Communication was always difficult given time zones, languages, and the lack of computer systems. The coordination and fixes were all slow. I was talking to my daughter and she is in Portland. She was excited. She called and said, “The couch that I ordered in October 2021 is going to be here. I forgot what it looks like.” We are all getting used to waiting a little longer than we used to, but it is nice when they arrive.   We still seem to have these shocks every once in a while. Shanghai had more COVID. In the US, we are seeing shortages of headcount in a lot of places, especially in warehousing, dock workers, and trucking. There is a lack of capacity when it comes down to it. [caption id="attachment_7991" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Container Logistics Disruption: The two things to watch to know when congestion and prices will moderate are consumer spending on goods in North America and labor availability.[/caption]   I know everyone wants to know and figure out when this is going to be over. I do not think it is going to be overnight, partially because I do not think that the disruption is going to be over soon. The fact that we have got basically almost no trucking going on in China despite the manufacturing plants being open, but the trucking operation is pretty much ground to a halt. It means we have got days of inventory that are going to stack up and then need to be pushed through the system. The disruption and uncertainty are going to be a part of our new normal. With regard to when the average demand and supply get back closer to where they used to be, it is going to be a matter of consumer spending and labor. We love the idea of things normalizing and getting to a new normal, but we are seeing inflation and other problems. We see the war in Ukraine and the recurrence of issues in China with COVID. We have trade issues with China. In a lot of ways, the new normal is not normal. The new normal is going to change because of events outside of our control of weather or geopolitical. Change is going to be more prevalent in the coming decade than it was in the last few, which is why to some extent, I think we did have that false sense of security that everything was working. We did have a period of relative sanity, which allowed us to fine-tune the system despite its insufficient infrastructure. We talked about the way it used to be pre-COVID years ago and what happened. What is next? What is next is recovery. I think that, in time, we would expect to see supply improve and consumer spending on goods moderate a little bit. We are seeing an increase in consumption of services, which makes sense because there is the ability to do that. My wife works in travel and she has never been busier. People are eager to get back out and travel again. I do not think we are going to see the end of events and discontinuities. Those are two things to watch to tell us when congestion and prices are going to moderate are going to be consumer spending on goods in North America and labor availability. Talk about those shocks. There are many ways we can describe this. We could say our supply chains got a little brittle, meaning they broke rather than being bent. Another way to describe it is we have too many risks in there and a lack of resiliency, depending on how you want to talk about it. We know we are going to have some more shocks in this system. How do we deal with all that? There are a few things. A lot of this is ongoing. It is already happening. We need to stop looking at the supply chain as a simple commoditized part of the operation. It is not a simple call center. It is not something that should be managed by a small team in procurement focused on the cost lever. This is a C-level topic. The supply chain is and forever will be a C-level topic. Shippers need to be thinking about all the things that they can do to accept the fact that the logistics industry will always be more complicated than it used to be. Part of that is more safety stock. I know you are an auto guy. The old just-in-time Math assumed simple, easy commodity-priced trucking and logistics operation. The world is more complicated than that. Certainly, some companies are looking at how I can think about de-risking my supply chain, both in terms of the number of locations that I sourced from, to increase the number so I have more flexibility. If I lose one node, they will be looking at nearshoring and reshoring. The math on those deals is never easy, but they are certainly spending time thinking through that, especially thinking about that in light of new sustainability targets. All of my clients are hearing calls from their clients who are hearing calls from their customers to say, “How can I be more sustainable? How can I meet the new carbon aspirations?” You hit a whole bunch of topics. I want to break them down a little bit. It speaks to where we are at in this business. The first thing you said is this is no longer a small decision. When I used to sell logistics and supply chain services, the way I sold mostly less than truckload in some truckloads, but we had the technology. I remember I would call and say, “I want to talk to the owner, the CEO, the head of operations, or a general manager.” We impact finance because we are going to take some of those functions away. We do it as part of our service. We interface with the sales guys because they are the ones who are always saying, “Where is my stuff?” We work with your ops team on the inbound and we work with your logistics team. A lot of times, when I would call that C-level guy, they would say, “Talk to Tony in the back.” The disruption and uncertainty in the shipping industry will be a part of the new normal. It's not changing overnight. I would go see Tony and back, and he did not want to have a strategic discussion. He did not care if the finance guys had to audit the bills. I said, “We audit the bills because we have a TMS,” and I start my whole spiel. I am going to parody this a little bit. He was like, “Those guys got me Kid Rock tickets.” That is why he bought from that logistics company. He did not have that strategic focus that I wanted my customer to have. One of the things we have all been through is when you call that guy and say, “I want to manage all your freight. I want you to use our technology and you are going to see all of your shipments there. He says "I will give you an Excel spreadsheet with all our loads in it. You put your price in and if you are cheaper, I will give you those lanes tomorrow.” I was like, “I do not want to save you $50 on tomorrow's load. I want to save 10% on your annual spend.” It would be like, “What are you talking about?” The number might have been used to bend. We spend $500,000 a year, which is bad enough to leave it to somebody who does not care about the strategic function of logistics. Now that number got to $5 million, you go, “What the hell, guys?” There is a lot of change on both sides of that transaction that we are going to go through over the next few years. I have a good friend who is a former CEO of one of the container lines. He says, “Enough with this value base. I lose customers for $50 a box. It does not matter how much better we are.” That was the history. In that world, you do not have the right executives in the decision on the shipper side. You do not have the head of sales, marketing, or operations. You have someone in procurement. When you have someone in procurement, they have one metric, which is how they can get the unit costs down. You also need to get better on the sales side. The guys that I work with, the carriers, trucking companies, and railroads, now have an opening to say, “It was not so commodity-based,” but they have got to be able to deliver. They got to be able to go and articulate what they do that is different than the next guy and why that is worth it. I always use the same analogy back in the olden days when we had stockbrokers. They are transactional. You would always hear the term churn. They wanted to churn your account, “I want to sell your Dell stock and move you over to Apple.” They make money on both of those transactions. Those guys did not care about your overall financial picture. They cared about what you had in your investment account. Now we have moved to financial planners. You do not hear anybody say in their stockbroker. Financial planners are aligned with their clients. They say, “We are going to get paid 1% or 1.5% of what you have in your account. I want to make you rich so I can get 1% or 1.5% of that every year.” It is the same thing in this business. We have to switch out of this transactional thinking and move to that financial planner. A lot of companies want to do that. They do not want to be ringing the bell and having the siren go off that they made $1,000 on a transaction and celebrating at the office that day. That is a lack of alignment and it is yesterday's news. You will see more gain share partnerships and relationships like that between carriers and shippers. It takes real change on both sides. This will be the shock that gets the awareness to a place where those things are pursued. Not just between carriers and shippers, but to some extent, between different players in the logistics chains, carriers and ocean terminals, railroads and trucking lines, warehouse fulfillment operators and last-mile parcels. One of the things I want to touch on briefly is the timeout containers. We will get more back to the containers for a second. We started using containers a lot in the late ‘50s and ‘60s. There is a book, The Box That Changed the World. Prior to that, we could not even do global trade because the cost of logistics was so high. That was a tremendous innovation. We have seen this change the world. We would not be doing nearly the global trade we do now without it, but we have not seen a lot of innovation in that space. Now we are starting to see information technology. That is another piece of that. Speak to that and the sustainability that is important to us. The technology has come along in terms of tracking. It is available. You will see more adoption of that, especially in the reefer space, but also in dry boxes. I have seen a lot of startups and investments in foldable boxes and alternative equipment. The main way we are going to get better sustainability on our container fleet is by finding better ways to extend their lives.   I never heard that. We are throwing a lot of those out. [caption id="attachment_7992" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Container Logistics Disruption: 75-80% of containers are leaving LA empty so they can be filled up in China with more goods while there is a shortage. That's because the supply chain has always been an afterthought.[/caption]   We lose track of a lot of them because we do not know quite where they were. Telematics, tracking, and things like that will help there. How long does a container last? There are containers out there that have been in the fleet for twenty-some-odd years. The average is probably closer to 12 to 15. There are all sorts of uses. One of them is use for alternative storage. If anybody from the container ship lines is reading, give me a call and I will deliver you 50 containers. I live about 25 minutes out of Ann Arbor. There are some farms and not quite rural, but I always drive by and think, “What are you doing with that container?” They only need them where they need them. Our supply chain is imbalanced. They need them to pick up soybeans and send those to São Paulo. The fact that they are in Ann Arbor does not help them a whole lot because of the amount of money and time spent to get them down there. Managing that global fleet better and extending its life would be great from a sustainability standpoint. It comes up a little bit on my show about sustainability. Some people might be shaking their heads and say, “I do not believe that the man is causing global warming.” I always say, “I do not care what you think. It does not matter what I think.” This is what consumers and brands are asking for it. When one of those big brands says, “What are you doing?” you better have an answer. It is too late to do anything at that point. You do have to embrace it now. There are a lot of small ways. When it is over the road, we are trying to get rid of empty miles. That starts with measuring the empty miles, which brings me to another point. We were saying that 75% to 80% of containers are leaving LA and Long Beach empty so they can go be filled up in China with more goods for us. Meanwhile, we have a shortage and we have gone mad. It is illogical, but the understandable conclusion from the supply chain is an afterthought. The supply chain has always been an afterthought. It is not designed. It just happened. There are many forces well beyond the global supply chain that decide what is our import and export balance with China and where do we manufacture intermediate goods for auto? There is nothing logistics can do to account for the fact that there is that much import-export balance on goods. With empty backhaul and empty miles within the US, there are a lot of things that the logistics industry can do to help. There are smarter ways to reroute though there are still a lot of empty miles even in the US. I have become more aware of this. There is the empty truck that is moving from LA to New York, and you go, “That should never ever happen.” I do not think that happens nearly as often as it used to, but what is becoming more of a concern is the half-empty trucks and you go, “I had 10,000 half-empty trucks leave this location. Is there a way?” I know there are technologies and the guys over at flock freight and others are saying, “We can do something about it.” The main way of getting better sustainability on container fleets is by finding better ways to extend their lives. We will see more shared loads and multi loads where everyone will call multi-stop, where we are going to say, “That truck is full.” That is good for the environment and truckers. For the shippers, we are going to have to figure that out. We do not want to put I-can't-move-your-food onto a truck with auto parts. We have to be careful about how we manage it with the shippers but I think it is going to lower the price of shipping. Once we are fully loaded with the real cost of all of this stuff, whether it be the drivers, assets, new vehicles, or the autonomous and electric vehicles that we bring in to make a more sustainable fleet, the cost per unit is going to be higher. It is going to put the burden on us to figure out how we can make better use of each of the units. Maybe it is two hours later, but that allows me to share a load and double my density on the chunk move. All of those things can happen in time, but it takes great collaboration between carriers and shippers to make it work. The transparency and tools of the data exist to be able to do it, but it takes tremendous collaboration and trust to get it done. I am going to put you on the spot here. I know you work with a lot of different companies. I want to tick off some standard categories and what kind of work you are doing for these companies. Let's say an over-the-road carrier calls you. What do you tell them these days? What would be a typical project you would work on with them? Over the road, carriers were doing a lot of work and helping them think about how their network is going to change as manufacturers figure out a new supply chain or as we try to start to think about electric vehicles and ultimately autonomous vehicles. Not just how should you think about the timing of those technologies, but what are the network decisions you are making now that will feel sub-optimal in 5 or 10 years because the investments that those companies make in assets and infrastructure are not short-term. We are helping them think about sustainability in terms of how they can help their shippers with their sustainability targets. Those are some of the big themes. Do you talk to any brokers, 3PLs, and non-asset-based? What are you doing for them? Sustainability is a topic for them in terms of how I can provide. I am already helping them knit together. A lot of them are trying to figure out, “How can I knit together solutions across modes? How can I optimize those around sustainability targets?” We are doing a lot of work almost across the board in growth. How do companies find growth? There are a lot of new freight flows that are coming, not just because there are always new freight flows that are coming, but sustainability and the targets that all these companies are taking on are creating a whole lot of new goods to move. We are working with a lot of companies, whether they be asset-light, asset-heavy, broker, truckload, but also parcel and the like. It is like, “Where do you find freight? How do you get it? How do you leverage the tools today to find those companies?” Do you work with Final Mile or Last Mile guys? We do. We work with from a pallet and LTL Final Mile, and heavy goods Final Mile. We do a lot of post and parcel work. We have got a huge practice globally that has done tremendous work in helping drive efficiency in the postal space and parcel as well. They need it.   Those companies are struggling. [caption id="attachment_7993" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Container Logistics Disruption: Once the real cost of all these new things comes, the cost per unit will increase. It's going to take time to manage that. There needs to be a great collaboration between carriers and shippers to make it work.[/caption]   From what I understand, the Final Mile for home delivery to goods is the most expensive part of the journey. I was not being critical of the post office. We want it to be better, but we put a lot of constraints on it, and I think it is the hard part. I do not want a pallet delivered to my house and then distributed all of those parcels to my neighbors. I would like just my piece delivered to my house. Getting my piece delivered to my house is expensive. The costs are getting better relative to the pallet moves because the density of residential delivery has come up so much. Many years ago, the density of residential delivery was terrible. It was hard to make the economics work for the big parcel companies. As our volumes have gone up, that has improved the relative density, but it is still tough. What about warehousing and fulfillment? We have seen so much change in that space. What is going on when you work with them? First of all, permitting and getting sites are extremely challenging. The sites have to be closer to current consumers. If you want a site or the old model of three sites in the middle of nowhere, you can still get that. If you want the sites that people want now, which is one hour or maybe even less outside of every resident in the country, those sites are hard to come by. We do work with developers on construction and permitting on how to do that well and how to forecast and identify where the sites are going and where you need to be. We are also working with operators on how to drive productivity in those sites. We are doing a lot of work on how to refine, recruit, train and retain talent. That is a theme across all logistics. I was talking to somebody about a paint company and they said, “We do not have anyone retire from this location.” It was their DC. The reason they had no one retired from there is because it was a young man's game. He did not want to walk 10 miles picking stuff up and moving stuff around. We have to make that job in the warehouse easier so you are not breaking your back. If you walked by an auto assembly plant and walked through it, you would see that nobody was doing a job that was backbreaking or that required excessive strength, crouching, or reaching. We have eliminated those and we see that same mindset move into fulfillment. Those guys are going to become technicians rather than strong backs. We have had conversations for years about technology in the fulfillment space. Now it is happening. They made fun of us many years ago because it was early and no one had proven all the economics. It was whizzbang cool stuff, but is it having an impact now. There are certain functions that are being largely automated and you are seeing high ROIs. Also, you have got a lot of technology now that is more flexible than it used to be. Building the $10 million conveyance system just for this client and then hoping you retain them is a scary proposition for a fulfillment operator. Having flexible, robotic assets that can move seasonally or move to a new facility if you lose a client. We are also seeing longer contracts which helps. Fulfillment operators are saying, “I do not want to do a three-year deal.” You can't facilities for that and build a location if necessary for a bigger customer. We are trying robots now. This is becoming somewhat like automotive. In automotive, what we learned is if you give me one year, I am not going to invest in it. From a container line standpoint, a lot of people are trying to figure out how to facilitate end-to-end shipping better. The payback cycles on some of those technologies are getting shorter, but it is hard to make many of them work on a three-year contract. We are seeing a lot of fulfillment players and manufacturers agreeing to 5 or 7-year deals or agreeing to co-invest in the technology that they want to offer something that customers can't get elsewhere. Let's circle back to the beginning. What do you talk to about the container people, the guys with the ships, the rail, drayage, and the modal? From a container line standpoint, a lot of them are trying to figure out, “How can I better facilitate end-to-end shipping? I do not know if I want to own all those pieces of the operation.” It does not do me a whole lot of good to get it to the port if it sits in the port. Much worse is it does not do me a whole lot of good if I am sitting at the pilot station waiting to get into the port. A lot of the conversation and work in the container space is, “How do you collaborate with the terminal, the rail operation, and the consolidation or deconsolidation facility to get boxes and get them back?” The whole concept of end-to-end is probably the strongest when you think about container terminals, dray, rail, or trucks. Figuring out how to create more seamless, more partnerships, and share data to do that. In some of those, you see the metrics and the CMAs of the world that are investing quite a bit in buying companies to knit together that offering, They are buying over the road companies here. They made an extra $100 billion or something in those ship lines during COVID. To your point, they are investing in that end-to-end solution. Somebody said this to me and they work closely with one of these companies. They said, “Do not be surprised if we see single-use containers because we do have a trade imbalance with China.” If that container is only going one way and I have to ship it back on a boat that is filled with containers that are empty, somebody might say, “Why am I shipping it back there?” “It is because these are expensive containers.” Do they need to be expensive containers? Could they be less expensive and single-use? I know somebody is going to say, “What about recycling and all that?” There is a design that has to happen here. We got people like John and his team there. They will figure it out. From my perspective, we see it in automotive. Sometimes, you ship back the containers that brought your stuff. Sometimes, you do not because it does not make sense because it is one way. Do you guys work with air freight companies? We do but it has been a challenging and rewarding a couple of years for air freight. The belly players have been tough because they have not had the majority of their capacity with many of the passenger lines, much of the passenger capacity down. The pure freight players have done extremely well. Airfreight was a key enabler and one of the early winners in the pandemic and continues to be. I think the questions on air freight are how can they use advanced analytics to drive even better forecasting of volumes and, therefore, even better service levels and yield management? We think there is a lot of opportunity in the air freight space around advanced analytics and pricing. I heard it from Flexport and the guys over freight ways. One percent of all overseas volume is on air freight, but it is 30% of the revenue. What it speaks to is you are not shipping auto parts, usually on a plane. You are shipping electronics, chips, medicines, and stuff like that that is high value and small. Mostly high density. Value per cubic foot is off the charts. That ratio feels approximately right. I also heard that 50% of the air freight is passenger planes.   That is why air freight prices absolutely skyrocketed. [caption id="attachment_7994" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Container Logistics Disruption: A lot of the work in the container space today is how do you collaborate with the terminal, the rail operation, the consolidation & deconsolidation facilities? It's all about creating partnerships.[/caption]   They were flying anywhere. They moved up first. Ocean container rates have skyrocketed too, but in the air cargo, when your supply chain breaks down at some point, the only option you have is to get it there. It is the last resort for a lot of things and the first resort for high-value cargo. A lot of companies, for the release of the phone, will send enough phones for the first couple of months via air, and then they will send the backup to refill stock via ocean. In a pandemic, it was the first choice. The majority of the global air freight capacity is the belly of the passenger. When so much of our passenger fleet was grounded without anyone to pay for the international passenger move, you lost the belly cargo. I heard somebody use the term preighter, which is passenger freighter. They sometimes took the seats out of planes and filled them up. Other times, they put stuff on the seat that you might have been flying to a conference on. Now, it has got a stack of mobile phones on it. I am going to try and summarize all this and then I want to get some final thoughts before you go into what is new over at McKinsey. The topic is disruption and container logistics. John talked about the steady-state. We will talk about many years ago, pre-COVID, and what happened during COVID, that horrible time with demand spike, capacity down, sick people, and broken supply chains. We learned how brittle our supply chains were. You talked a little bit about what is next and where consumer spending is going. We are spending more on services and a little less on products. We are going to see how the industry reacts to what are still shocks and aftershocks of what happened. We do not even know the implications of the conflict in the Ukraine and inflation. We are better, but we will see. Lastly, we talked about what we learned during this time that logistics is not a commodity and that we have to insist on a seat at the table. We no longer be just a commodity service. John took us through all of the different things he and his team do with their clients. Any final thoughts on this big topic, John? A few final thoughts, two things we did not talk about and one thing I wanted to reinforce. We did not talk about the war in Ukraine. The near-term impact of that has not been huge on the global logistics industry. Carriers have pretty quickly rebalanced their networks in response to that. The long-term impacts could be significant. Ukraine and Russia are large exporters of commodities like wheat, oil and gas. I think we will see a lot of those supply chains shift around. While we are all watching the human tragedy and suffering through it, the near-term impact from a logistics standpoint has not been significant. We have been talking so much about eCommerce. It is going to be omni commerce. You have seen a bit of a drawdown and a correction back. We talked about ten years of eCommerce acceleration in two months. That was true. You have seen brick and mortar make a comeback. Some things are better are bought in person. My kids bought mattresses online and they are like, “We love it.” I was like, “I am going to have that mattress for ten years. I have to lay down on it.” I am not going to look at 5,000 reviews. I love eCommerce, but to your point, some of those shopping experiences are going to have to become experiences, not a pain in the ass experiences. Everyone wants to go to the Farmer's Market or a cool boutique. We have to get back to a cool experience if I am willing to leave the house. For shippers, many of them want to get to a place where they are managing more on Omni channel commerce supply chain. One of the most frustrating parts of the pandemic was when we had out-of-stock items on the website and obsolete items sitting in storerooms in the retail centers. That was painful and was a function of having two supply chains, which is the case for many shippers. They built their old brick and mortar supply chain, then they added a supply attender to eCommerce, and they did not talk to each other. You will see companies now figure out, “How do I have one more flexible Omni commerce supply chain?” There are going to be some variations. There will be times and products where you want to buy online or in-store. Certain companies will have a blend of the two. That is where we are going on that front, which we did not talk about but I think is important. It also needs to be designed. It has to be created. It can't be a bolt-on because we bolted on the gig economy and thought that, “We got an eCommerce solution.” Instacart, Shipt, and some of those solutions for grocery, from what I understand, the grocery store companies are losing money on those and they obviously do not like that. The gig economy stepped up. It is great. We are always going to have it. There's a lot of opportunity in the air freight space around advanced analytics and pricing. We are always going to use it in logistics, but it needs to be managed by logistics guys who are operational experts and good at routing and technology. It can't just be, “Bob down the street buys groceries for the neighborhood. It does not work as the way it needs to.” We are going to see those grocery stores become grocery store/fulfillment centers in some cases or maybe one fulfillment center in the Detroit Metro area that serves all of the eCommerce. Some of those business models will evolve. Even a company as great as Instacart or some of the early applications is adding cost on the top of the already existing flow and retail, brick and mortar, and all that stuff. The ideal way of doing that is to have dark stores that are designed for efficiency and pick, pack, and ship, not for the grocery experience that we have all grown to love. Tell us what is new over at McKinsey and how do we reach out? Do you have any webinars coming up or case studies? We love to have conversations. The best way to get in touch with us is on our website. It is easy to find me or any number of colleagues. You can send an email and we will respond. I will probably get the email. If I am not the right person to talk to, I will find someone else. On the site, we have got an interview with Sanne Manders, the COO of Flexport, which is great. We are putting up content all the time. What conferences are you guy going to?  I know we are excited about TPM in 2023. When is that? TPM is in Long Beach in the early spring every year. It is still a long way away. I do not know what the next conference we have got. We have coming up in May 2022 in Northwest Arkansas. I interviewed a professor from the University of Arkansas, the number one supply chain school carrying Gartner. John, thank you so much for taking the time. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure talking to you. I look forward to keeping in touch. It was my pleasure.    Important Links John Murnane The Box That Changed the World Flexport Sanne Manders https://www.LinkedIn.com/In/JohnPMurnane/  – John Murnane https://www.LinkedIn.com/Company/Mcinsey/ – McKinsey & Company   About John Murnane John advises companies across a variety of industries and continents on their transformation and growth efforts. His broad cross-sector experience ranges from hospitality to global transport—including hotels and airlines, ocean and air freight, and trucking and distribution—and spans the value chain from capital-intensive real estate development to asset-light brokerage and distribution. He advises clients on growth at both a strategic and tactical level including M&A, new product development, value-based pricing, digital sales, and sales force effectiveness.  

Mike talks to Seller Universe Ecommerce Group CEO Martin Zerrudo about Amazon DSP and how brands can successfully leverage ads with it.   A relatively new system, Amazon's demand-side platform (DSP) analyzes consumer data and finds the right customers to target ads with.    Unlike Facebook or Google ads, DSP gives you access to a wider network of third-party sites and reach people both on and off Amazon, albeit a pricier option.   A fair warning: doing ads with DSP can get very granular and specific, which can be intimidating to those unfamiliar with it. However, it can be highly effective when executed correctly.   I tried out DSP ads last year with IceWraps and although we didn't get the results we wanted, I still think it's a great system.   We have Martin with us today to give us better insight into how the system works and what makes it a formidable tool for ecommerce brands.   Martin, thank you for coming on the podcast and for sharing that message from August. It means a lot to Dave and I.   If any of you listening to this episode is interested in trying out DSP ads, go to the Seller Universe website and fill out the contact form.   Don't forget to leave us a review over on iTunes if you enjoy our podcast. Happy selling and we'll see you in the next one!

Christopher Hamze, CEO of TeeLaunch uses technology to connect your e-commerce shop to factories all over the world – helping people start and grow businesses with print on demand. Christopher has been searching for print on demand his entire life, he just didn't know it. His early entrepreneurial efforts started with a candy shop at the age of 8 to then helped grow the family pizza business through his teens. Even after pursuing an MBA and law degree, Chris always knew something was missing. He knew he had the entrepreneurial spirit but he just didn't know what to do with it. That's when he discovered print on demand. After 8 years and over 4 million items fulfilled, he still spends every day doing what he loves – helping people start and grow businesses with print on demand. From running the equipment and designing workflow solutions, Christopher does it all. Teelaunch is the first thing he thinks about every morning when he wakes up and it's the last thing he thinks about before going to sleep. If you need help running your print-on-demand-based business, get in touch with Christopher today! Connect with Jon Dwoskin: Twitter: @jdwoskin Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jonathan.dwoskin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejondwoskinexperience/ Website: https://jondwoskin.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jondwoskin/ Email: jon@jondwoskin.com Get Jon's Book: The Think Big Movement: Grow your business big. Very Big!   Connect with Christopher Hamze: Website: teelaunch.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/teelaunch LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/2610371/admin/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/teelaunch

Try Privy for FREE today Get your copy of The Ultimate 2022 Ecommerce Holiday Calendar Check out Privy Masterclass Try The Shopify Store Grader Check out The Ecommerce Marketing Playlist Join The Ecommerce Marketing Community Check out our book, The Ecommerce Marketing Handbook Get your free copy of Ecommerce Marketing Recipes Ecommerce Marketing School is sponsored by soona and #paid.

Today is part 2 of 5 in a series of solo episodes where I break down my favorite marketing book,  The Catalyst: How To Change Anyone's Mind,  by Jonah Berger. Listen in as I explain why catalyzing change isn't just about giving people options, it's about helping them let go of old patterns and habits that no longer serve them. Whether you are in an eCommerce business, or an online coach, easing endowment allows you to make sure the right people find you at the right time so they can take the next step in your customer journey. After you listen, send me a DM on Instagram @itsgeirgebryant to let me know if you have a customer journey that eases endowment. As always, if you enjoy this series and the Podcast, leave me a review on Apple, Spotify, or other platforms. It helps other entrepreneurs find clarity in their own lives plus allows me to keep putting out great content for you.  What you'll DiscoverThe definition of endowment and why your customers won't take actionHow to surface the cost of inaction so your customers choose the right path every timeWhy burning the ships can lead to more loyalty and trust in your customer journeyTime Stamps00:00 Intro To the second part of The Catalyst,  Endowment 03:17 What persuasion is and why do people  take that next step in the customer journey 06:24 The definition of  endowment 09:21 Why catalysts help demonstrate the actual cost of inaction 10:50 The longer people do or own something,  the more they value it13:02 If the potential gains barely outweigh the potential losses, customers will not budge15:59 How to ease endowment so your clients understand what is possible18:15 The cost of not implementing a customer journey 20:35  Why you need to understand your customer profile, and how it can cost you a lot of money on the back end if you don't implement endowment 24:26 The greatest way to ease endowment is through time and touch pointsNotable Quotes“To create change, the perceived gain has to be 2.6 times higher than the current situation in order for somebody to feel that it's time for them to take action. - GB “ For every 10 customers coming in, 8 of them are leaving due to their lack of journey.”- GB

In dieser Episode von Ecom Secrets spricht Daniel Bidmon darüber, warum es nicht der Realität entspricht, dass es einfach ist, einen Online Shop aufzubauen. Erfahre, welche Faktoren den Erfolg deines Online Shops beeinflussen und wie es dir trotz aller Hürden gelingen kann. Wenn du Fragen an Daniel Bidmon hast oder möchtest, dass er und sein Team dir bei der Skalierung deines Unternehmens helfen, dann vereinbare jetzt dein kostenloses Strategiegespräch: www.ecomsecrets.de/termin Daniel Bidmon & sein Team zeigen dir, wie du das Marketing für deinen Online Shop so aufbaust, dass du profitabel auf 6 bis 7-stellige Umsätze skalieren kannst. Mit Facebook Ads, der richtigen Kundenansprache und weiteren Methoden, um erfolgreich zu wachsen.

Rob Harrison-Plastow is the Chief Marketing Officer of eCommerce store The Moon Phase Studio. The studio exists to empower its customers to become more attuned to the moon through art, books, and rituals. It was founded in November 2020 and they went from zero to £200k sales in just 8 weeks! Listen to hear tips on how constraint creates creativity Facebook Ads SEO, CRO, and customer research! Get all the links and resources we mention at https://ecommercemasterplan.com/podcast/?utm_source=captivate&utm_medium=episodenotes (eCommerceMasterPlan.com) Mentioned in this episode: null null This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Speaking Podcast Social Media / My Other Podcasts + Donations https://bio.link/podcaster About my Guest: Marcus is an Online Service-Based Side Hustle Coach, helping 9-5's and aspiring entrepreneurs alike get started in their side hustle journey. In his early years, Marcus has always sought to start his own business, but failed at a blog and eCommerce store, prior to uncovering his passion for helping others. Taking the leap of faith, Marcus secured 2 paid clients (with the help of a coach) in less than 90 days, despite starting with ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Today, Marcus is super passionate about helping others get started in their own journey after he has seen the possibilities for himself. Based in Singapore, Marcus enjoys watching NBA, EPL, One Piece and Korean variety shows in his free time. What we Discussed: - His Side Hustle Podcast - Helping with Mindset - How to land your 1st paid clients - Should you use Organic or Paid Leads - Don't be afraid to fail - BNi and other Networking Options - What Social Media to use. and more How to contact Marcus: www.marcuscheu.com https://www.instagram.com/marcuscheu/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/roy-coughlan/message

In today's Ecom Vault we go behind the scenes of a 9-figure business selling glasses! Dropshipping glasses have been an extremely popular trend, in fact when dropshipping became common knowledge, the first type of products people would dropship were eye glasses and sunglasses! In today's video, we build out a very popular dropshipping store for you to model and use! Use the above templates by getting an account on storefunnels.net▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Get The Best Selling Book ‘Ecommerce Empire' For FREE: https://ecommerceempirebuilders.com/book WATCH NOW 7-Figure Ecom Masterclass: http://bit.ly/funnel-class-yt Have Us Build & Launch Your Entire Ecommerce Business: https://bit.ly/BuildMyFunnel-YT FREE Empire Builder Bonuses: https://youtu.be/QknqB0dpDKc Sign Up For StoreFunnels (Website+Funnel Builder): https://www.storefunnels.net▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

En este episodio conversamos sobre la compra de Deliverr por parte de Shopify, qué objetivo y qué implicaciones tiene. Sobre el próximo día del padre y por qué es importante preparar nuestro ecommerce para esta fecha: claves, estrategias para vender más y un artículo del blog de Shopify que les recomendamos. Y cerramos con el famoso efecto ROPO en México: qué es, por qué tenemos que estar atentos a esto y cómo podemos sacarle el mayor partido con consejos y soluciones para tu sitio en línea. PRUEBA SHOPIFY GRATIS, sin ingresar los datos de tu tarjeta ni datos bancarios, haciendo clic aquí: https://bit.ly/3s8pjlG 9 ideas para vender más el Día del Padre con tu ecommerce LINK: https://www.shopify.es/blog/ideas-para-potencializar-tus-ventas-este-dia-del-padre Webinar “Rumbo a Hot Sale”: https://bit.ly/3l6aDkQ

On today's episode, Kunle is joined by Mathieu Mireault, Co-founder of Dermadry, a world-leading manufacturer of iontophoresis machines for the treatment of hyperhidrosis. There are products that need more than an Ad on Facebook, Google on Instagram to hit that buy button. Some brands need more exposure or old-fashioned word of mouth to garner the customer's attention.  Dermadry is a world-leading manufacturer of iontophoresis machines. Their whole product revolves around those suffering from hyperhidrosis, a medical condition characterized by excessive sweating. With such an unusual product, going to market is an expected challenge but by going further beyond the borders of the usual digital means, they have found a way around one-sided ads. Their secret? Affiliate marketing.  In this episode, Kunle and Mathieu talk about the genesis of Dermadry. You will get to hear about the best strategy for effective affiliate marketing. This is a great episode for business owners and marketers looking to up their game to further their company and product's digital presence. -----------SPONSORS:This episode is brought to you by:  WayflyerAs you continue to grow your eCommerce business, access to growth capital will increasingly play a significant role in achieving and surpassing your financial goals.Why should you give up equity or pay high interest rates to grow your business?There is a new way to access growth capital that transforms eCommerce businesses.Wayflyer has shaken the way eCommerce operators access working capital.With a dedication to only DTC eCommerce businesses, Wayflyer will fund you on a fairer “fund as you grow” model, meaning if your sales slow down, so does the amount you transfer back..There is just a simple fee and the funds you need to grow are deposited to your account instantly.It's worth checking out – Wayflyer.com Klaviyo  This episode is brought to you by Klaviyo – a growth marketing platform that powers over 25,000 online businesses. Direct-to-Consumer brands like ColourPop, Huckberry, and Custom Ink rely on Klaviyo.  Klaviyo helps you own customer experience and grow high-value customer relationships right from a shopper's first impression through to each subsequent purchase, Klaviyo understands every single customer interaction and empowers brands to create more personalized marketing moments.  Find out more on klaviyo.com/2x. Gorgias  This episode is brought to you by Gorgias, the leading helpdesk for Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce merchants. Gorgias combines all your communication channels including email, SMS, social media, live chat, and phone into one platform.  This saves your team hours per day & makes managing customer orders a breeze. It also integrates seamlessly with your existing tech stack, so you can access customer information and even edit, return, refund, or create an order right from your helpdesk.  Go to Gorgias.com and mention 2x eCommerce Podcast for two months free. Recharge This episode is brought to you by Recharge, the leading subscriptions payment solution for Shopify merchants. Recharge helps eCommerce merchants of all sizes launch and scale subscription offerings. Recharge powers the growth of over 15,000 subscription merchants and their communities—turning one-time transactions into long-term customer relationships. Turn transactions into relationships and experience seamless subscription commerce with Recharge. Find out more on rechargepayments.com/2x. 

Want to know how you can deploy a smart warehouse for your business? Today's guest is Dan Gilmore of Softeon, a company that provides a full suite of flexible and robust end-to-end supply chain software solutions to deliver success. He joins Joe Lynch to talk about the idea and technology behind their system. They discuss some of the big trends impacting warehouses, e-commerce, and retail. From labor shortages to automation, Dan enlightens on the benefits of WMS and WES for any business. Tune in to better understand the perks of this new smart technology for optimizing your business! The Smart Warehouse With Dan Gilmore Our topic is the smart warehouse with my friend Dan Gilmore. How's it going, Dan? It's great. I'm happy to be here. I'm glad I'm finally getting to interview you. Please introduce yourself, your company, and where you are calling from. I'm a Chief Marketing Officer of a supply chain software company called Softeon. Our company is headquartered in Reston, Virginia, outside of Dallas Airport. I happen to be in the Dayton/Cincinnati, Ohio area. What does Softeon do? It's a supply chain software company, primarily a supply chain execution. The company was founded in 1999. Our first customer all the way back then was the L'Oreal, and we proceeded to build out a suite of solutions that were brought in deep capability. That includes warehouse management systems, and all the stuff that goes around warehouse management systems including labor and resource management, slotting optimization, and yard management. A newer thing which we will get into because it's critical to what's happening in terms of the smart warehouse is something called warehouse execution systems, which have been around for a while but gained prominence in the last couple of years as a way to optimize and orchestrate order fulfillment level at a capability that's beyond even very good tier ones. This category of stuff is called distributed order management, which has to do with the optimal sourcing of products based on customer commitments as well as network capacities constraints in how do I get the lowest cost alternative that meets the customer needs? It's a very prominent in omnichannel commerce. It is almost essential in retail but we are having a lot of B2B type of successes in distributed order management as well. There are some other things that could give a flavor to what we do. You started well before eCommerce was a thing. Do you still support stores and that kind of warehousing? Traditional WMS type of capabilities for retailers, would largely be store replenishment. Now, we are moving into eCommerce fulfillment. Many retailers are also looking to have a lot of activity at the store level, whether that's buying online, pick up in-store, curbside pickup or store fulfillment. We've got some solutions there, both in terms of the distributed order management that I referenced. It is the tool going that says, “The best place to fulfill this order from based on the time commitments as well as inventory availability, labor availability, etc. is store 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,” and then have the ability to first identify where it's the right location. That could be obviously a DC, a third-party facility or something like that. The first word is the best place to source it from, and if it's a store, we have a store module that facilitates the inventory transactions, picking transactions, and shipping at a store level. That became a thing. Target is one of those companies that if you buy something online from them, they are more likely to ship from their stores these days. I have seen and the figure keeps rising. The whole market has changed. The more high-tech feel and touch, the less back-breaking work and less bending over and lifting heavy cases. It's like 80% or 90%. Let's say 90%. That's the number I had in my mind too. They are doing them from the store, which is incredible. Before we get into all that, tell us a little bit about you. Where did you grow up and go to school? Give us some career highlights and bullet points before you join Softeon. I'm an Ohio guy. My whole life, I grew up in Akron, Cleveland area, and then got a job with NCR after grad school. I got an MBA from the University of Akron. I got a job at NCR that was here in Dayton. I was a Product Manager in charge of barcode and data collection. The way serendipity works, I moved from barcode data collection systems to wireless systems and then got into WMS. I was into consulting for a while. I have done a lot of marketing in the space. I was also Chief Marketing Officer at the Red Prairie before it got acquired by JDA and became ultimately Blue Yonder. Earlier in my life, I spent a couple of years implementing WMS, a couple of major projects down here in the Cincinnati area that helped me learn a lot about how the technology works and what's good and less good. Notably, in 2003, I started a publication called Supply Chain Digest, which changed the face of online supply chain and logistics, news, and coverage. I still keep a light hand on it. I still write a column once a week still for Supply Chain Digest. I have read that. I wrote a lot of blog posts in the past. When you are a writer, I have joked that “My research is a little different than a professor's research, I Google.” You start to realize which publications have good content when you are a blogger. The bar is a little lower for a blogger than it is for somebody who is writing in a publication. I would say, “Supply Chain Digest always had good stuff.” When and why did you join Softeon? It has been a few years now. I had done a little bit of side consulting with Softeon before joining, and I was impressed with the breadth and depth of the software and the number of innovative capabilities, but as important as that is, lots of companies have good software. We think we've got leading-edge software but the approach to customers and success - I have never seen a company that consistently puts its own interests behind its customers on a regular basis. We are not going to let anything get in the way of a successful implementation. That's a direct record that's unequal in the marketplace. It's the care and concern for success at the customer level and not looking at everything through a lens of only professional services hours if I can sell or something like that. It was a different attitude. It intrigued me, and plus, the company needed some help in the marketing area to get that message out. The combination of those factors led me to join Softeon. Our topic is the smart warehouse. Obviously, things have changed quite a bit in this business. Talk about some of the big trends that are out there that are impacting warehousing, eCommerce, and retail. It impacts everybody. Most of the audience is going to say they are living this or these are big surprises but it's nice to still put it all in context, the growing distribution labor shortage and there's a shortage of manufacturing. It's very acute. Everywhere you go, that's what you hear about the turnover levels, retention, and even with the greatest rising substantially. That's everyone's concern. After about a decade of very flat wage growth in warehousing and distribution until a few years ago, now, all of a sudden, the costs are taken off. Amazon has over $20 an hour with attractive signing bonuses in many parts of the country. They now offer parental leave for twenty weeks. I saw it on TV. That would be a very attractive benefit. That's the advantage. Target announced that they were raising their wage in both stores and distribution centers, not all markets but in some markets, by $24 an hour. That's $48,000 a year, and assume there's probably some overtime in there, whatever husband and wife are making up, for example. They are working at a Target DC in those markets, you could be pulling in $100,000 a year for a family, which is not bad money. [caption id="attachment_7940" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: With the e-commerce-driven cycle time pressure, it's unbelievable how fast you can get products these days.[/caption]   This has come up on my show a few times. I'm getting too old for that kind of work, and I can't walk 10 miles a day but if I had a choice, we need to make that job easier. We are going to get to that because this is what technology does. It also makes the job more attractive when they can say, “I go to that job, and I'm learning all this cool technology.” If you can bring somebody in, there's a different feeling when I get to wear all that high-tech gear and use high-tech systems and say, “I'm part of the supply chain,” as opposed to, “I'm a strong back, walk 5 miles a day and nobody gives a crap about me.” There are no questions about that. It's going to be both in terms of the shortage of labor and, second, building to attract people into this career. Now the whole market has changed, that more high-tech feel and touch, less back-breaking work, less bending over and lifting heavy cases, and all the kinds of things to go on and work for a long time. You are spot-on on that dynamic. If we have a shortage, that means the people we do have to be more efficient. The way they can be more efficient is with tech. That's one big trend going on. What's another big trend? There's a bunch in there that interrelated as well. Obviously, the eCommerce-driven cycle time pressure. If you look ay Amazon over your tablet, it's unbelievable how fast you can get products these days, even somewhat obscure products not that long ago, I need a new power cord for my HP computer. Somehow Amazon was able to deliver that the next day. I'm like, “Probably, they have this cable in someplace that they can get it to me one day.” Think of all the thousands of cables that are out there, and they've got mine. The cycle time pressure in that both are in terms of getting the order process from when it drops into the DC and out the door. Obviously, companies are also moving distribution facilities closer to the customer, so the transportation part of the journey is cut down as well. They will remember the specific numbers. It's Home Depot that is building 170 or 180 different local fulfillment centers that are being the largely cross-dock type of facilities that bring bulky items in and get them right to the customer in addition to the big giant warehouses that they already have. It's a fact of life. Eventually, we will teleport or whatever the product from the warehouse because it seems like we are reaching the Laws of Physics there that it can't be here any faster but maybe we will find a way. I remember, many years ago, I was working on a digital marketing project. I was helping this distribution center, nice, concise in Chicago land Peoria. They said we are one-day shipping to 65% of the population of the US. That was always what Indiana, Illinois, and there are so many DCs down in Ohio can always make that claim, and that was good enough. If you said, “I have a DC in the Midwest that can get me to the Eastern Coast, and I have one out West, that was good enough.” We are not seeing that anymore. We are going to get increasingly where same-day delivery becomes a fact of life rather incredible. Amazon and others talk about getting it down to 2 hours or 30 minutes. That's what Target is doing, not with those DCs. We think we will get to Walmart doing some of the same. What's another trend? Obviously, because we are calling the session, we are going to talk about the smart and also the future but it's largely here nowadays. We've got smart everything. We've got smart houses, cars, refrigerators, and toothbrushes even. I saw that a couple of years ago. I'm not sure if it's exactly taken off the map but to monitor how often you brush your teeth. What does it mean? Primarily, it's talked about internet connectivity and some analytics around that. The least examples are John Deere, Caterpillar or companies of that kind, putting sensors and other IoT types of devices on their equipment out in the field so they can get a sense of how people are actually using it. They can do predictive maintenance on it. They could say, “Your guys aren't using the equipment as effectively as they could if they changed their techniques.” It's certainly timely. If we are going to almost start things where it's time for the smart warehouse too but we will get into for the rest of the broadcast era left different than more internet connectivity, sensors, and things like that. That can be part of it but it is a small part of it. The bottom line of it is we are entering a new era of where all soccer technologies that are, in fact, much smarter than we have ever had before. I have argued publicly for a couple of years now that we had about twenty years of relatively incremental progress in WMS technology. I used this in speeches before but a few years ago, I was cleaning up my office and running the holidays as I often do when I found an RFP from a major food company for a WMS circuit in 2003. I looked through that and I thought, “This doesn't look all that different than the RFPs we are seeing in 2019, 2020 or whatever year we are looking at that.” I looked at it and said, “The big difference is not in the functionality being asked for. It's that now, a lot of that functionality is, in fact, core product, configurable product than maybe a lot of it had to be achieved through customizations.” That's probably true. Same-day delivery has just become a fact of life. The fundamental way of where WMS operates didn't change all that much give or take from 2000 to 2020 or somewhere in that range. Now, with the smart technologies that we are talking about, they are brought by the world's execution systems in working with WMS, I talked about before. This is a new ball game, and it was going to be fun for the rest of the people here to talk about this. You throw in a new term there. You said warehouse execution system. Those have been around for a while but they are now becoming the norm. It's becoming very prominent, and then the value is starting to be recognized. What is it? A couple of three companies had the belief and correctly, for most of the WMS systems did not care enough about equipment throughput and utilization. We wound up with big peaks and valleys, and anybody have been in a district distribution center, even a busy one. You have seen it where there are all kinds of activity at the beginning and the middle of the wave, then as the wave starts to dissipate even on a big, expensive, huge sortation system, you've got a relatively small number of boxes moving around, waiting for that wave and everything to close out. You said wave. Does that mean the orders come in waves? Yeah. The work is released in what is called pick waves. That's based on any number of different attributes. It could be the carrier schedule, value-added processing that needs to be done or workload balancing across the different pick areas of the company. You organize the work against various attributes that constitute a block of work that's typically referred to as a wave. I know I've got all these trucks that are going to show up and they are taking different orders, so maybe I'm working to that order that's going to fill up that truck. The problem, to your point, is we've got already may be a shortage of headcount in there. Now when we have waves, I'm not being efficient because I've got too much work at one moment and then not enough at another. The whole goal of WMS of what we're talking about with the smart warehouse is overcoming, I mean, obviously, you've got to plan and execute based on the workforce that you have here, and we will talk about that. Having a warehouse management system that gives me stuff was great in the past but you are saying, “I will help you with a WES or Warehouse Execution System. I'm going to help you manage the flow.” Manage the flow work and the resource utilization, and then new ways. Part of that still ties into that interest in level loading or making the flow of goods across an automation system more smooth and consistent because if you can do that, there are a couple of things. First off, the total throughput of the system is likely to be better. Second, if it's a new facility, you could probably get by with a smaller sorter because you are going to be able to utilize it more consistently over a block of time, a shift or over what you want to look at it there. The other breakthrough that Softeon said is that the WES tends its roots and level loading of the automation and better utilization there. The WES works extremely well, even in non-automated facilities or lightly automated facilities. [caption id="attachment_7941" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: The fundamental way a warehouse operates didn't change all that much from 2000 to 2020. But now, with smart technologies, this is a new ball game.[/caption]   As a matter of fact, one of our leading customers did a press release a couple of years back that talked about 50% productivity gain from implementing WES or Warehouse Execution Systems on top of existing Softeon WMS, and doing that in a totally manual environment. Everything is part of a system. You can have a sortation system, goods to person system or put wall system or whatever. It's got a certain capacity, throughputs, inputs, and outputs. Twenty workers walked around on a three-level case pick module. There are systems too. They have inputs, outputs, throughput, and expectations. The one big difference is that with a more manual system, you can throw more bodies at it up to the point of diminishing returns and gain through the port from that area, whereas a heavily automated system is rate as its rating. You are not going to do a whole lot to affect that. Throughput is everything, whether you are a plant, a freight broker or a warehouse. The stuff that goes out the door and that we can charge for is what we want to do. Having a warehouse management system is great. I know there are certain warehouses. Probably the old ones still don't even have that. You are saying to be as efficient and effective as you need to be in the market, you need a warehouse execution system that gets me the flow and that throughput. It may not be for everybody, and there are certain things you can do. We could take your core WMS and add some select capabilities from a full-blown WES if a modest level of that kind of automation is necessary. It's not necessarily for one, and I don't want to position it that way but it's certainly something that you want to take a look at as you get to where you've got a significant number of workers. Even smaller operations, things like the automated release of work to the floor without the human being need needing to be involved, that's going to be attractive even for a mid-size operation. The first thing we need is we need to get into this. WMS is given. You said that there was an incremental improvement for many years. Now, you are starting to see big improvements that may be driven by the market that needed big improvements in recent years. Part of that is this WES. What else is there that's part of that smart warehouse? There's a whole bunch of stuff. First, as a reminder, the automation because automation is tied to the labor shortage. Even a couple of years ago, it was very common to talk to DC managers or logistics executives, and automation wasn't necessarily very high on the radar. Nowadays, almost close to 100% of the companies we talked to, even smaller companies, are looking at automation of some kind. That could be big automation where you've got traditional sortation systems but can be very large, goods to person systems, those kinds of things. There's also a lot of interest in lighter, more flexible, and less expensive technology things like what are called put walls. What's a put wall? In great simplicity, it is a technique or a structure, which is a module with a series of cubby holes or slots. In one of these modules, we have 1 customer that has 80 of these modules. What you do is you pick the orders, then when you come to the put wall, you distribute the order to the different orders that need that product. I batch pick the product. I bring it either mechanically or manually to the put wall. Typically, a series of lights says, “This company wall number 3 here and needs 1 of the skews. Put wall in. This one needs 2 that skew you put two in. This one needs 1 put 1 in.” That process repeats itself until all of the items for a given order are complete within that cubbyhole. That's called putting. That's why it's called a put wall because you are taking the order in back, and then you are putting it into the put wall. Around the backside, lights will turn on that indicate, “This cubbyhole is now complete.” The operator comes up and touches a button typically. That starts the printing of the label in any shipping documentation that's required in the orders packed, shipped, and off you go. It provides a tremendous amount of productivity. It's very flexible. You can start small. We had one customer that started with a 1-foot wall module, then added 8 or 9 more because they liked it, then they added 20 more because they really liked it, and did this all over a couple of three-year types of the period there. For any kind of piece picking, especially of soft goods but other types of products as well but often driven not only by eCommerce with any kind of heavy piece picking operation can be a great solution but you've got to have the right software to do it. You've got that big like almost a shelf you said like cubbies on that I'm putting a product through it. Maybe I walked over, and I got 10 different sweaters, 10 sweaters that are all the same, and this cubby gets one. As I do that, I'm scanning it or it recognizes that it's in there. It's informing the other side of the cubby when the order is complete. It needs two sweaters and a pair of shoes. That's just one more way. What do you call this? Technology is only part of it. The other piece of the cubby that walking up to that, I could be putting those in bins in the old days but this is putting that on steroids. The bottom line is we are entering a new era where all technologies are, in fact, much smarter than we've ever had before. It was just a new way of doing it. There are a lot of people who talk about this in terms of optimizing materials and handling systems because getting this right is not a trivial task. I don't want to steal all my thunder from later on but the ability to rapidly turn these put walls and cubbyholes are the whole key to the success. If it's taking you a long time to do that, you are not getting the throughput that you required and probably wasting your time and money but if you can rapidly turn those by making sure the inventory gets there on time and efficient execution on both sides of the wall, then you've got something that can drive a lot of productivity. I don't know what the number is. There are quite a few customers now that are using put walls. When we would go out to some new customers, we've got some videos to show them an operation, and they are interested in seeing how this works. It's the technology along with mobile robots that you are going to see, any eCommerce but any kind of piece picking as well, you are going to see a lot of adoption. I'm an automotive guy originally. When you used to go through a plant, you would see people doing lifting heavy things when I first started, crouching down and doing functions that were hard on the body. Maybe it's not hard on 1 day, 1 week or 1 month but over 1 year, you are going to have a bad back, shoulders or knees. The same thing happens in these DCS or the warehousing. This automation you are talking about is making it easier on the workers, which means, “Hopefully, I will be able to keep my workers healthy and make that job again more attractive.” One time, I talked to a VP of logistics at Sherwin-Williams, the paint company. He noted that on the manufacturing side of the operation, they were always having people retire, and during retirement, little parties were almost taken. He said, “There was no one that ever retired from the distribution side.” That's because the heavy worker is picking cases of paint as a young man's job. As people got older, they couldn't do that work anymore. People are obviously rethinking that for the aging factor, and then there's another factor, “How do I make the work easier so I can have somebody in their 50s and 60s continuing to do this at distribution center job?” If you gave me a choice to go work in an old school warehouse, go deliver food or deliver groceries, I'm going to do the grocery delivery. I can make decent money, sit in my car, and I don't have to hurt my back, or knees or walk 5 miles a day. We have to make these jobs more attractive or we are not going to be able to keep and get good people. This automation is of such interest to the jobs now that we become more technicians and less of an order pickers. Besides a put wall, what's some other automation you are seeing out there? The automated mobile robots, economists mobile robots or AMRs. There's a huge interest in that. One of the interesting things is that in both put walls and mobile robots, you are seeing a lot of adoption and interest by a third-party logistics companies. This makes the point. In the past, 3PLs were very reluctant to do any kind of heavy automation because they couldn't sync the return on investment with the contracts that they had from the shipper. If the shipper can pay off that equipment, it's going to take 5, 7 or whatever years, and the shippers only keep you where 2 or 3-year contract, the risk of automation is too great in these other kinds of systems. It includes things like voice, picks the lights, and smart cards. They are all connected in some ways. Those kinds of systems can be put in for much less expense, much lower risk, and be incrementally adapted. You can start with three mobile robots and see how you like it, then we have seven more later on or whatever until you get to the optimal point for your operation. The fact that 3PLs are making this kind of investment as a whole new phenomenon and it speaks to the way you can incrementally get into the technology and the high level of payback that they are seeing because we were very strong in the third-party logistics arena, as an aside, so we are seeing it very closely. The number of 3PLs that are interested in this mid-range of lighter picking systems, not heavy automation but it's often somewhat newer technologies. It speaks to the changes we are seeing out there in the marketplace. Those are robots. Depending on the facility, they are not necessarily always replacing people. I talked to the CEO or president of DHL. He says, “We thought we would be replacing people with robots. The more robots we add to a facility, the more work we end up getting for that facility. We ended up hiring more people.” Everyone has a shortage. Job is going unfilled. If the robots are taking some of that slack but very few case studies of people that are adopting these technologies, they are still looking for people who have been able to be on. [caption id="attachment_7942" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: WES (Warehouse Execution System) will help manage the flow of work and resource utilization.[/caption]   What's another thing we need for that smart warehouse? Let's get into it in some more detail. We talked about some of the core software components, things like warehouse management systems and warehouse execution systems. A platform for integrating this automation with both heavy and/or traditional and newer age capabilities. There are some enabling technologies, things like rules engines, simulation and some other things. The core world's operations excellence is still the foundation. How do I get that right? That typically involves traditional WMS-type capabilities. What does that mean? What defines a warehouse management system versus an inventory system is the pervasive use of mobile terminals, barcode scanning, wireless RF devices or whatever term you want to use there, and then a lot of system directed activity, this whole notion of task management and task monitoring, where the system is orchestrating the different traditional paths of put away, receiving put away, picking replenishment, etc., and support for multiple strategies around that. We have lots of different picking method options, different replenishment strategies that I can use, and things that have been around for a while like slotting optimization, detailed labor management, labor reporting, and things like that. The foundation is core operations excellence. That's what everyone should strive to get to but nowadays, there's no ability to take that even further in terms of different types of capabilities that we think are defining what we are calling the smart warehouse. You used a term there that was an integration platform. What am I integrating? You were integrating primarily different materials handling technologies. That can be things we have had for a wall that conveyor transport and sortation. It can be some of these newer technologies like robots and put walls. The key is, “How do I optimize the flow so I don't have these islands of automation that are all doing their own thing.” I talked to somebody in the apparel industry. They have a very large and highly automated facility somewhere down in the Atlanta area. It's 1 million or 2 million square feet. They are seeing their throughput from that building after huge investments over the years and over time. They are seeing the throughput decline. What's happening, he believed, is that the business keeps changing. They keep having all these new requirements in terms of how an order needs to be processed. What they do is they keep building new wave types. We talked about wave planning before. Now they are up to like 70 or 80 different wave types. Every time there's another problem, wave fight number 82 if that solves our problem, it's not solving the problem. Part of the reason is that the system is not looking holistically across the facility and seeing how I can optimize the flow of work as a whole, not as an individual subsystem. That's part of what we are talking about here with the smart warehouse. That's the thing that traditional WMS has not done. That integration platform means I can connect all the tools and all the different systems I'm using all connect easily through that integration as opposed to the old way, which is a standalone $100,000 integration with expensive people who have to code. That's certainly part of it. It's managing the flow of work across that. I'm getting hit myself again but for example, you can have some scenarios where I have different paths for an order to be fulfilled. One of the paths and the most efficient for certain orders is maybe a group of put wall models. Let's say put wall area, for whatever reason, starts to be congested. All of a sudden, there's a big backup on the conveyor feeding into the put wall area. The system is going to automatically recognize that. For some time, route orders away from the put wall into manual cart picking, which takes them to the packing station, the same packing area where the put wall automotive leads. When the congestion is clear, then the system automatically reroutes that work back to the put walls again. Now you are looking at only the plain integration but in monitoring the flow of work that's happening and making real-time decisions accordingly. I'm an automotive guy, and we had all of those years. We used the term smart factories, and it was the same thing. How do we increase throughput? What can happen is you can end up with a local optimum where some guys are building a big stack of inventory and does nobody any good? What does all that excess inventory doing for me? What makes more sense is to say, “We are going to get this, so there's a flow to it. We are not building up too much inventory. There are no bottlenecks.” This is the same thing. What you are talking about here is, “How do I arrange my people so I don't have these guys sitting around because they already finished while these guys are in a congested area?” The core world's operations excellence is still the foundation. The term flow manufacturing came out of exactly what you are talking about there and was largely developed initially in the automotive industry. We are talking about the same thing. Now we are talking about flow distribution instead of flow manufacturing but the fundamental concepts, more of a pull-based system were being worked on capacities and constraints, more concerned with the total flow of goods and not what's happening in one individual area. All those are very consistent, whether you're looking at the principles that were established earlier in manufacturing or what's being applied here in distribution. I'm going to assume that at one time, the WMS, a big selling point would be, “We will tell you where your inventory is at,” That was probably a big step up. You go, “It does that. Now I'm going to tell you how that inventory moves off of your shelves and out the door and how you bring new inventory.” It's amazing. We still see quite a few every week, we see somebody that's a calling or emailing in, and then we talked to him. It turns out they don't have that real-time visibility of the inventory because they are using some kind of paper-based system or something, and sometimes these are even good size companies. In general, anybody that's implemented a tier-1 or tier-2 level, even WMS shouldn't have that real-time inventory visibility in doing that. It gets into that operations excellence and problem but that's the foundation, “I got to know what I got and where it is by lot, batch, serial number or whatever attribute is important for your operation or combination of attributes.” That's the foundation, but now, we are saying, “How do we optimize on top of that and get more product out the door and lower cost?” It requires investment. Having a WMS tell me, “Here is the information but it's not enough anymore.” To your point, we need all of this to get there. You asked me about some of the components of the smart warehouse, and I talked about it from a product category perspective, but now, I'm talking about it more from a philosophical or a functional view. One of the key foundations is constraining condition awareness, “What's happening in my building? What's happening with the flow of goods?” One of the things that first got me to understand WES in a deeper way is this notion that it's always-on listening and monitoring the environment. If you think about a traditional WMS, it's more sequential-oriented, “I receive the product. I put it away. I replenished pick sites. I do the picking. I take it to pack or evaluated services. I put it in this receiving staging. I get it shipping staging. I get it out the door all very good then the delivered.” A lot of companies don't have that. Organizing and automating all of that are big steps forward but we need to take it to the next level. If you think about this notion, the system is always on monitoring throughput and flow. There are certain rates and throughput that I'm expecting. I need to be able to have a flexible set of dashboards supported by event alerts and notifications. If there's a problem that says, “Here's what's happening across.” However, I wanted to find it in the area, I can define an area as a case picking module or as a whole three-level case pick module. I see that as one unit, and I want to know what the throughput is there. Maybe I want to see it at each level of that pick module. I can see it more gradually. What's nifty about this is that new level of visibility, the activity, throughput, bottlenecks, alerts, and corrective action automated, increasingly automated, if there are bottlenecks. That provides a nice set of real-time dashboards of looking stuff where people can see what's happening, “I have these many orders pending here that's already been completed. Here's how many are in picking,” or all of that level of detail. To understand what's going on here with the smart warehouse is, the system is using that same data that's being exposed to managers and supervisors that's what it's using to make decisions as well. I decided that example of being aware of the backup that's happening in the put wall and automatically, for some time, routing work around that until the congestion is cleared. That's what's different now about this visibility and activity monitoring. Being able to flexibly do that however you want to define a processing area could be evaluated services. It could be peace picking and all these things. Obviously, now the design is at these different flows throughout the facility are in sync. I'm not getting old backed up and packing, which is causing problems way back, picking and replenishment because I haven't automated the visibility and the flow, release in a way that's going to be cognizant and aware that I've got a problem here and, “Here's what I need to do about it for some time until we are adjusting. We are just taking action to solve the problem.” You sent me a PowerPoint and I have this here. It's got that real-time configurable dashboard. It's been a while since I have seen somebody had me a piece of paper but somebody handed me a piece of paper that had 40 columns. It was like an Excel spreadsheet or something, maybe a spin out of a system. It had so much, I looked at it and I was like, “What am I supposed to do with this?” I liked the idea of being able to configure it for those KPIs that I care about. [caption id="attachment_7943" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: One of the things that got me to understand WES in a deeper way is this notion that it's always on, listening and monitoring the environment.[/caption]   I don't want to measure everything. That's just me. Tell me the 4, 5 or 7 things that matter that tells me my warehouse is moving in the right direction, and that things are working well. It says, “Orders with issues.” I also love the idea that I don't find out about the issues in next week's report. I find out about them in real-time. The point that you made is a nice transition to this notion of another component. We talked about the real-time visibility of capacities, constraints, the conditions up there, and the always-on nature of the WES. Now, we have talked about looking at a table of 40 rows of information or whatever. It's all in the past. It brings up a point there, which is even with higher-end WMS, this is one of the learnings and insights that we have. There's still a tremendous amount of decision-making that is being done by human beings. As the manager, whoever you were talking about there in your example, staring at a 40-row spreadsheet or whatever, you see the same thing nowadays of managers and supervisors staring at computer screens, trying to figure out what the right thing to do next. Here's the reality. Every time you do that, first off, you introduce some latency into the system because it takes time to look at those different screens, think about it, make decisions, and scribble some things down on a piece of paper to remind you this needs to be taken care of or whatever. In most cases, there's no way a human being can make the optimal decision in the same way that a computer can. Even if you are a smart guy or girl, there's just too much data and too much to try to process at one time. Part of the capabilities of the smart WMS is the much more advanced software-based decision-making. Things like order batch optimization, given block of orders, “What's the best way to most effectively execute that on the software floor?” What we think is absolutely huge is this notion of the autonomous warehouse, as a term of Gartner is used, and others have used it as well but it talks about being able to automatically release work without the need for a wave planner, inventory expediters or all the kind of people that you see often involved in these decisions about what work to do when. Work relation on a variety of attributes, things like the order of priority, the inventory and resource availability, what kind of optimization opportunities are there? The bigger the order pool and more optimization opportunities you have because they are more data or conditions to be optimized but you can't hold on so long. You are not getting the throughput out through your cutoff time. This is a huge one. It's sophisticated. Whereas now, at 4:00 or 5:00, when the UPS, FedEx or whatever truck is leaving, you often see, and we have made commitments to the eCommerce is going to ship, you see a certain amount of chaos going around, trying to figure out all the orders that need to go on that truck, have been on the trucking and what to do about it. What we are talking about here is we are saying, “This is the work. We know how long it's going to take to pick and transport those orders to the shipping dock.” The work is going to automatically release itself. At the beginning of the day, we are more concerned about optimization. We still got a lot of decent amount of time, so we can focus on doing it the most efficient we can but as you go throughout the day, that needle starts to change from the focus on efficiency and cost to efficiency on customer service and making sure that those items are on there. The system does that automatically. It's configured to take those into consideration. Now those orders are getting on the trucks automatically without the chaos and the difficulty that's going on out there. This is a step-change capability here. We are talking about a system that is self-learning and in optimal how releases work. This is another concept we have had in distribution software before, and this is what defines what works on the smart warehouse. I had a boss in the past when I was young, I remember I sent an Excel spreadsheet to him, and it told a story. He's pulled me into his office and said, “This is a great Excel spreadsheet. I have to go through here and come to the same conclusion you did.” I go, “It's easy.” He goes, “No. When you send me this Excel spreadsheet, send me a recommendation. I don't want to have to come to a conclusion. That's your job. Show me that you attach the data back up but give me a recommendation.” I feel the same take way about running a warehouse, “Don't make me figure it out myself. Give me an alert that says, ‘This is a problem. This is how many orders are at risk. This is how many orders need to get on that truck that isn't done yet.'” To show you a simple example. Still, a lot of people, especially for eCommerce, are doing manual cart picking. I may have a cart that's got a certain configuration 3x3 or 4x4. What I mean by a 3x3 would be 3 shelves that each have room for 3 cartons each. I have nine total orders that I'm working on there. Most companies that we see do that are doing it with paper picking or pick by label or something. There's some attempt to do that more efficiently but something as simple as cart picking. The smart warehouse can take it to a whole new level. First off, you've got to get this order pool that's out there and at any one period. I'm probably going to have done some cartonization logic there to determine what should go in what box, especially with a multi carton order. In most cases, there's no way a human being can make the optimal decision in the same way that a computer can. Even if you're really smart, there's just too much data to process at one time. If you are shipping, for example, you don't want to put perfume in the same carton as payroll because of the obvious contamination that can happen there. When a picker comes up and scans a barcode on that cart, the system is going to automatically know it's this configuration, 3x3, 4x4 or whatever. It will have done some optimization typically in terms of what's called cluster picking were, “I'm going to take that cart to one location. I will put as many orders as I can on the cart that is signed to that cart that has the same set of skews so I can minimize my travel distance. Hopefully, I'm being clear on what that means.” Now I get to that location that can be done with lights or it can be done with barcode scanning. It says, “Take one of these from this location, put it in the carton slot 3'1, which is the 3rd shelf and the first location. The next one is 3'2. 2'3, 2'1 or whatever that sequence. I'm doing that in a way that makes it very efficient but we can take it even still beyond that. What if a high-priority order comes on? The pickers walk along as long as there's a location on that cart, whether it's a carton or a tote they are picking into. If it hasn't been started, we can remove automatically a lower priority order and insert a higher priority order that has come down onto that card as long as we would typically do it. The picker doesn't have to turn around and go backward as long as it picks for the new order or ahead of that picker. We do that without the picker, even being aware that it happened. You can expedite automatically like, “I got a truck that's going to be here one hour. We haven't even started yet. Let's get this going.” We say, “If you get an order in by 2:00, we will ship it that day. If it's 1: 58, all of a sudden, an order drops. I got two minutes.” This isn't going to automatically insert a higher priority order possible. I like something you said in there that we talked about the labor problem with these guys walking around maybe 5 or 10 miles in a day. One of the reasons we are going to quit, especially if you are me, is I don't want that many steps. When I walk over there, all my orders are in the same area, then I walk over here, and all my orders are there, as opposed to one side of the warehouse, and another order on the other side or I'm walking and go, “What has my life become where I walk back and like this?” Order pool optimization as well because the bigger the batch that I'm working with, the more opportunities I have to gain those picks together. On a given card, I'm maybe walking a very few feet. To your point, and this is where you get into the whole notion of mobile robots because now, perhaps that, “I go to the pick location, I pick the order but I'm putting it on a pick card. I'm putting it on a mobile robot, and the mobile robots can move on to the next location or on the packing of the orders completed. I'm walking very little at that point or comparatively little, which is one of the attractiveness of mobile robot technology.” Hopefully, it's becoming clearer. The nature of the warehouse is changing, and a part of that's going to have to be to not only be more cost-efficient and get more out the door with the staff that I've got but it's making sure that people have a less miserable work experience and hence hopefully going to stay with this a lot longer. This is not your grandpa's warehouse anymore. To be competitive, it used to be like, “These guys are high tech because they have a WMS.” Now we are starting to spin out the automation, the warehouse execution, and the integration platform. This is all getting really high-tech. Do you think this is probably the lowest-tech business there was many years ago? House is all going to play out. It's going to be interesting to see but the lighter automation techniques, including the robots and the put walls, are so attractive in terms of their flexibility and expandability. There are machine learning, artificial intelligence, and all kinds of things going to be involved here. The warehouses are becoming technology centers. If you see the private equity money that's flowing into robotics firms, AI firms, and others, in a lot of the smart money, it's the work that they do. Companies, retailers, and other eCommerce companies are starting to realize the importance of a well-run warehouse. Was this guy's quiet logistics? They've got bought by American Eagle. That was American Eagle recognizing the traditional retailer, the same thing we're going to buy ourselves a warehousing company because that's how important this business is. The force behind what has become locus robots. We will move our vendors that happened because Amazon had bought key assist systems right before that and left a quiet without a partner for automation they were building the business on. They invented their own robot. [caption id="attachment_7944" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: What's really different now about this kind of visibility and activity monitoring is being able to flexibly do that however you want to define a processing area.[/caption]   Bruce Welty was at my show. He's the Founder of Quiet. He said he got a phone call saying, “Are you guys using those Locus robots?” He says, “Yeah, how do you like them?” “We like them a lot. Can we come to visit?” “Sure.” It was Amazon. Amazon looked around and said, “We love this.” They bought Locus. A couple of other things I would like to bring up. First, broader use of some automation ideas or IoT type devices. RFID is starting to make something of a comeback years after Walmart tried back in 2003 or 2004. Generally, you are going to see many manual scanning activities that are going to disappear or if I need to move this way back now from being implemented at the store level by customers concerned with the eCommerce fulfillment for inventory equity purposes, you are going to see a move back up into the distribution operations. That will certainly be a big part of it. We were already doing things like, for example, we are a broker with a pick cart. Picker with a pick cart can walk up to a fixed zone. The IoT automatically recognizes that this person is on. It automatically turns on the pick lights that are on those four pick locations. It's a minor thing there but that's an advancement we are going to see. We have even done some stuff with congestion management and COVID, where we can tell exactly where somebody is in the I or using IoT and being able to assign work based on real-time visibility to who's closest to that work, but also when the COVID area being able to space people apart so that they don't get to say within 8 feet of each other, whatever that happens to be, whatever your metric you want to use, therefore that group constraint. There are some various things that can happen there. This is still slow going. It hasn't taken off as fast as many people think but you are going to see RFID and IoT start to make some mural inroads over the next years. We have this follow the notion of Gartner and what's considered to be called a conversational voice. The transactional voice is doing the picking, pallet build or something using voice technologies. Typically, reading in a location check digit and doing a hands-free pick, replenishment or whatever the task might be but we're starting to get now into more of a dialogue. We are all ready to the point now where we can have a supervisor take a smartphone and say, “Show me how I'm doing on wave number 235,” over a smartphone. That's going to bring back exactly what's happening now or, “Where's the replenishment for location on 3652?” We are still early in this game here but certainly, we will move to more of a dialogue going on with the WMS and WES than just playing transactional voice-type of technology. We ended with a very exciting where the future interface of the software is going to had. This is where that integration platform you talked about comes in handy. I can connect to all this stuff. The new killer app that comes out, I can get it. We have been left there. Automation and optimization of materials handling systems is certainly a key part of this. We refer to it, not just as a smart warehouse's the future but as the smart automated across to the future due to the interest in the technologies we have talked about several times already. We can directly connect with these picking assistance, like walls, pick the light or voice without the need for third-party software. Everyone else uses some kind of software from the put wall vendor, pixelate vendor or voice vendor, which adds another layer of integration and costs. It often results in people operating silos. We can directly control a lot of these materials handling technologies. It allows you to operate and optimize those in the context of everything that's happening in the world and all the information that's available, which provides you a lot of benefits over time because you are not just trying to operate in silos. I talked to somebody that was using a pick-to-light system. They talked about how at the end of every week, they've got to go in and clean up all these pics that some of them never were executed in the pick-to-light system. I'm not quite sure why that is but it wouldn't happen with the way we are approaching things because we would be aware of that. It probably has to wait on a real punishment. The problem is the pixelate vendor doesn't do replenishment the documents. You've got these silos going on here and there are a lot of opportunities. In terms of that integration platform, we think this is especially true for mobile robots, people are using the mobile software of the mobile robots. What that does is it limits the total optimization that can be achieved but more importantly, you are now totally dependent on that robot software. What if you want to add different robots or change horses three years from now? There's a better mousetrap that works faster or whatever that happens to be. Now you have become locked in. We refer to it not just as smart but the smart automated across to the future. We think the market needs a mobile robot and a broader automation integration platform. It's almost like an operating system for automation in the warehouse that's going to allow you to have visibility to optimization of robots of different kinds from the same manufacturer of different types for different manufacturers. You are not locked in. It's like a plug-and-play type of environment here three years from now. You can keep the robots or keep dependent you bought, but now, you want to add five more from a different vendor, plug them into this operating system, and have instant connectivity and the ability to optimize the performance. We think that's a much more low-risk approach going forward than locking yourself into a vendor that's coming to the software that's coming from the robot vendor. Get back to the idea of a smart warehouse. It's all about throughput. If I have different systems that are connecting, that are doing local optimums, that's a problem because it's not supporting throughput. I always need that one source of truth. That's the main system that says, “This is all about getting stuff out the door here.” I wanted to bring up one. Earlier, I talked about wanting to give an example of what the put wall. I referenced that as the cubbyholes in put walls. Here's the scenario we are seeing. Let's say there are three line items eCommerce order. Two of those line items in the order come from a carton flow rec area, that's very close to packing. I mean those orders are efficient to pick, in short distance to transport. The third line item is actually coming from a slow-moving mezzanine pick area that's farther away and is less efficient to pick. If you don't do anything, otherwise what's going to happen in those first two items from that order are going to show up rather quickly, then they are going to sit and wait for 10, 15, 20, 45 minutes or whatever it happens to be for that third item on the pick, the order to finally show up. The cubbyhole has been tied up that entire time. What's the smarter warehouse way of doing it? What's the WES way of doing it? Let's say it's 25% slower to go through the mezzanine or whatever the number you want to use it. We would release that third line item in effect 25% or 30% earlier. After the time it takes to pick and transport that as it's on its way to the pack station, now we release the other two orders line items in the carton flow rack. They show up at the put wall for processing at relatively the same time, and now I'm able to turn that wall without the latency that would occur if you didn't have smart software to do that. Hopefully, that's an example that makes it somewhat clearer as to how the optimization can affect operational performance. You would never be able to get that done manually. It doesn't happen. This is like drinking from a fire hose. There is so much going on in this. Put a bow on this. Give us your final thoughts on this. What do I need to get to have that smart warehouse? First of all, the benefit is it is going to reduce labor costs, have higher and more consistent DC throughput, you are going to reduce your need for automation in terms of things like the number of diverse or get more throughput out of the automation you have there. We didn't talk much about labor planning but that's a big part of it. We can dynamically assign workers throughout the course of a shift from 1 to 8 to 9, 9 to 10, or 10 to 11 hours where are they needed motion and in what quantities, improved automated decision-making. It's an assessment. Certainly, if you are heavily automated, there are a lot of opportunities for you. As I tried to make the point earlier, even if you're only modestly automated or not automated at all, these capabilities can have some real benefit for your operations there. The important thing to note with Softeon is these can be implemented very incrementally. I could implement a traditional WMS. Let's say I want the labor planning and allocation part of it. We can take that capability from WES and attach it to the WMS. To give you a solution, conversely, if you want to implement WES and leave your existing WMS in place, we didn't talk too much about that but that's a key dynamic. You need cartonization, which is a warehouse management function and even attach cartonization to that WES implementation. Flexibility is key. That's what we try to design. We call it a shirt component library, where the applications can borrow components, functionality, and services from each other. We are pretty confident that it gives us a chance to understand what you are trying to accomplish, what your operations are like or whatever that some combination of these technologies is going to have a pretty good fit and take your world to a whole new level than we have seen over the last many years. What's new over at Softeon?. What conferences do you go into? We have done with the motor show, and it was a big success for us. We not only showed the smart warehouse, we presented the smart warehouse capabilities. We had a lot of equipment pick the light, other packing stations, etc., right on our routes. At the bottom of every hour, we did a presentation. We had consistently good traffic the whole time. We did a bit of an educational track and a session on the smart warehouse of the future available on Softeon. It was very well attended. That was good. We will be at the Gartner Supply Chain Symposium down in Orlando and then break after that. [caption id="attachment_7945" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The Smart Warehouse: Even if you're just modestly automated, these capabilities can have some real benefits on your operations. These can be implemented very incrementally.[/caption]   We finished up a series of educational broadcasts called the WMS Bootcamp, six different sessions on everything from building the business case to how to implement it successfully. It was a huge success, but all of that's now available on-demand. If they go up to Softeon.com. You will be able to find some links to that. If you have any interest in WMS, they're not commercial, educational sessions. You will find they have a lot of value. The feedback we got on it was outstanding. I would like to watch myself because we went over this and it is gone from simple to more complex over time. I know you are simplifying it but to understand what's required requires a Bootcamp. We learned a lot of lessons. I brought in some consultants and people that I knew and knew what they were talking about in terms of building the business case. We had some folks from Invista that came on and did that. I had some experience or exposure. I knew they knew what they were talking about. Some of that applies to some other consultants as well. It's a real nice series. It's non-commercial. If you want to learn some tips about how to get WMS selection and implementation, you'll find the Bootcamp serves you well. How do we reach out and talk to you over at Softeon? The way to get me is via email. My email address is DGilmore@TheSofteon.com. You can also use Contact@Softeon.com for the general inquiry box. I love to hear from you. Hopefully, we came across, so at least you know a little bit about what I'm talking about and discuss your problems as well. Anyone who wants to reach out can reach out and talk to you about the smart warehouse. Thanks, Joe. I enjoyed it. It was a great conversation. Thank you so much, Dan. Thank all of you for reading. Your supports are very much appreciated, until next time and more network.   Important Links Softeon Supply Chain Digest WMS Bootcamp DGilmore@TheSofteon.com Contact@Softeon.com https://www.linkedin.com/company/softeon The Logistics of Logistics Podcast If you enjoy the podcast, please leave a positive review, subscribe, and share it with your friends and colleagues. The Logistics of Logistics Podcast: Google, Apple, Castbox, Spotify, Stitcher, PlayerFM, Tunein, Podbean, Owltail, Libsyn, Overcast Check out The Logistics of Logistics on Youtube

This episode features Nora Sudduth, the Chief Revenue Officer and co-founder of Hello Audio. She is a leading marketing and conversion strategist who has helped businesses sell over 5 million of products and services online. Find out why Nora believes it's important for a company to establish a clear marketing message and the best ways a company can do this. Listen as Nora explains how Hello Audio can help businesses achieve the three things any campaign need to be successful and why would an ecommerce company should consider launching a podcast. If you don't have a podcast yet, then you may want to listen as Nora shares how podcast can help with your business on differentiating your brand, enhancing the client experience, and connecting with the customers. Find out what Nora predicts on the future of podcast, the dynamic content and personalized service that Hello Audio have to offer. Episode Action Items: To find more information about Hello Audio, go to: https://helloaudio.fm/ (helloaudio.fm) ABOUT THE HOST: Andy Splichal, who was recently named to the Best of Los Angeles Awards' Fascinating 100 List, is the founder and managing partner of True Online Presence, author of the Make Each Click Count book series and Founder of Make Each Click Count University found at https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com/ (https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com) (https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com/ (https://www.makeeachclickcountuniversity.com)). He is a certified online marketing strategist with twenty plus years of experience and counting helping companies increase their online presence and profitable revenues. To find more information on Andy Splichal visit https://www.trueonlinepresence.com (https://www.trueonlinepresence.com/ (https://www.trueonlinepresence.com)), read the full story on his blog at blog.trueonlinepresence.com or shop his books on Amazon or at https://www.makeeachclickcount.com (https://www.makeeachclickcount.com/ (https://www.makeeachclickcount.com)). New episodes of the Make Each Click Count Podcast, are released each Friday and can be found on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, Apple Podcast and on Make Each Click Count at https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com/ (https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com) (https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com/ (https://podcast.makeeachclickcount.com)).

The in-Direct to Consumer eraWebsites are homogenous and lacking inspiration. If you remove the navigation bar, most websites are indistinguishableShopify's stock is down 75% from its all-time high. While the tech sector experiences pain and economic concerns loom, many brands will need to invest in experience“What do consumers care about? Fast, cheap, and free. Shopify turned a business buyer, a business operator, into a consumer; they want fast, cheap, and free. No wonder eCom is so uninspired.” — PhillipAssociated Links:Shopify down 75% from highStay tuned for VISIONS 2022…coming soon!Subscribe to Insiders and Senses to read more of our hot takes! Listen to our other episodes of Future CommerceTune into Infinite Shelf Season 2!Check out Decoded, our newest limited seriesHave any questions or comments about the show? Let us know on Futurecommerce.fm, or reach out to us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. We love hearing from our listeners!

Hey and welcome back to the show! It's Doone here, your host and hype girl.Thanks for tuning in to the solo episode for this week, where we'll be taking a deep dive into the beauty space, going over the biggest learnings our multi-millionaire beauty-founder-guests have gained from founding and building the brands absolutely killing it in their space right now. So Let's get straight into it. Learning number 1 stems from the dreaming phase. When you're n the very early days of imagining your beauty brand - and you're dreaming about the vision you have. And you're asking yourself what am I actually actually going to create? The luxury of being in this position is that nothing exists yet, because you haven't made it. You can literally create ANYTHING. So why not create your product in a way that will make your life a little easier down the road? When we look at successful beauty brands today, there are a couple of things that founders seem to have gotten right straight off the bat. My first learning is that you should create something valuable, you should create something beautiful and (nowadays) you should create something memorable or memeable. My second learning is that you absolutely want to be making that pre-launch effort, and you absolutely want to kick off with a bang. Start as you mean to go on. The truth of the matter is, beauty is SUCH a saturated space, and you need to give someone a reason to pay attention.The third learning, is to really think outside the box when it comes around to pitching your product to retail. Buyers in the beauty world are getting hit by constant blasts. There's so much out there, there's so much being created. Give yourself a chance by really making an impression. Ok. but I can hear you asking already. How to go about that? Amy Liu's story for getting Tower28 stocked in Sephora is a real cracker, and we'll talk through that in the episode.Lesson number four is all around not getting complacent when you do land your dream retailer. Don't get me wrong, it's definitely a win worth celebrating. Give yourself a huge pat on the back, and celebrate with your team. But it's by no means the finishing line. Getting in is the easy part, what's hard is getting the sale through.Which bring us to another area you can absolutely not get complacent in as a founder. It might not have always been the case, but today I can confidently say you would struggle to do well with your business if you're not leveraging this platform. If you listen to this show you know what I'm about to tell you. TikTok, obviously! In beauty, you're in such a fab position to do well on TikTok. So, that brings me to learning number 6, and one that lies particularly close to my heart. As a woman, if you're planning to be an entrepreneur, a pitfall i've encountered time and time again is this idea of perfectionism. So much of our paralysis comes from spinning in circles around certain things, when what we should be doing is just putting it out, seeing how people react, and then changing it. Get it out and iterate along the way. We are smart enough that we can always pivot, no matter what comes our way.And my last but not least learning from chatting to all these amazing women in the beauty space, is that all good things simply take time. We've heard time and time again, that it takes 0 years to reach overnight success. And it's okay it takes time. Let's get straight into it! This is me for Female Startup Club.And if you have something specific you want me to cover, just directly reach out on Twitter or InstagramDoone's InstagramIn sponsorship with Zyro, easiest to use website builder and eCommerce platformIn partnership with Klaviyo, the best email marketing tool for ecommerce businesses.

Most eCommerce owners struggle with hiring, let alone trying to hire when they're scaling at a rapid pace. Roc Pilon is a successful entrepreneur in business, real estate, and the fitness industry. He has a really interesting story coming from a trailer in Boise, Idaho dealing with the effects of the 2008 recession and going all in with $5,000 and an idea to innovate better powerlifting gear.  Listen in as we dive into how Roc managed to successfully hire 30 people over the span of two years using LinkedIn as his hiring tool and how he has approached compensation with the team members he has hired, including how he handles performance incentives. Roc also shares how to best get your team to model the core values of your business, what the downsides are to having a remote team, and how hiring an Operations Manager has been a game changer for him. You can find show notes and more information by clicking here: https://bit.ly/3LU3EY9 Interested in our Private Community for 7-Figure Store Owners?  Learn more here.   Want to hear about new episodes and eCommerce news round-ups?  Subscribe via email.

Try Privy for FREE today Listen to Part 1 here Follow Brooke on Twitter Check out Dear Brightly Get your copy of The Ultimate 2022 Ecommerce Holiday Calendar Check out Privy Masterclass Try The Shopify Store Grader Check out The Ecommerce Marketing Playlist Join The Ecommerce Marketing Community Check out our book, The Ecommerce Marketing Handbook Get your free copy of Ecommerce Marketing Recipes Ecommerce Marketing School is sponsored by soona and #paid.

Running an e-commerce store or SaaS business requires robust accounting software because of all the transactions and taxes that you have to pay in each country, state or province you have customers. If the software doesn't synch easily with your Shopify store, Woo Commerce or other software you'll be stuck in Excel spreadsheets, manual entry and more headaches than you can imagine. Tax rates vary by country and each state or province in that country. Miss paying taxes where you have customers and you can be in big trouble. We talk with Polly and Melissa from Synder about how to make sure you are tax and accounting compliant. About Synder Synder is a robust accounting platform that automates a significant part of finance management, providing accurate fast bookkeeping and reporting for e-commerce and SaaS businesses. About Polly Sidoruk Polly is the Product Manager at Synder. She is a knowledgeable bookkeeping automation consultant who has helped more than 4,000 businesses of different sizes around the globe automate their bookkeeping and back-office processes bringing efficiency into the flow, and this way, reducing the operational costs faced every day. S he is skilled in international accounting and eCommerce back-office automation, product, and team management. In addition, she is also proficient in the ins and outs of QuickBooks and Xero. About Melissa Williams Melissa is the Head of Content at Synder, a robust accounting platform that automates a significant part of finance management, providing accurate, fast bookkeeping and reporting for businesses. She used to run her own content design and strategy business, helping startups define their brand voice and tone as well as create content strategies in addition to UX content for in-app messaging. Melissa also served as a speaker at Geek Girl Tech Conference and Startup San Diego. She has also spoken at several online conferences/webinars about copywriting, brand voice/tone, blogging, and social media. Having worked as a content strategist, content designer, and content manager for 15+ years, she knows the ins and outs of all things content. EDGE's Weekly NewsletterJoin over 17,000 others and sign up to receive bonus content. It's free sign up here >>> EPISODE LINKS: Synder Accounting Software PODCAST INFO: Apple Podcasts: EDGE on Apple Podcasts  Spotify: EDGE on Spotify  RSS Feed: EDGE's RSS Feed SUPPORT & CONNECT EDGE's Weekly NewsletterJoin over 17,000 others and sign up to receive bonus content. It's free sign up here >>> Twitter: Follow Brandon on Twitter Instagram: Follow Brandon on Instagram LinkedIn: Follow Brandon on LinkedIn Please Support this Podcast by checking out our Sponsors: Mad River Botanicals 100% certified organic CBD products. The product is controlled from seed to end product by it's owners. Use code: EDGE22 to get 10% off all your orders. Shop here>>> *We respect your privacy and hate spam. We will not sell your information to others.

Ross Brand of Livestream Universe talks about some of his favorite books by authors he's interviewed, on Episode 40 of Livestream Deals. Recorded live on Amazon Live.

As the CEO and Co-Founder of D8a Driven, Nater's entrepreneurial focus is on the SaaS platform that is an amalgamation of his +10 years leading eCommerce businesses. From a University dorm room in 2008, Nater built the first multi-store grocery delivery platform in the PNW, which brought him to Amazon.com where he learned and experienced blowing up brands on the Amazon marketplace. This led him to develop an Amazon consulting agency that did the same for brands and sellers driving over $500M in growth on Amazon. And after 10 years of experience, he brought all of his learnings into the creation of D8a Driven, a platform that drives profitable growth for brands on Amazon by executing a tailored strategy using Big Data. He is engaged to a Canadian entrepreneur, and they live a life of adventure based out of a travel van and between homes in the mountains of Seattle, WA and shores of Victoria, BC. Nater prides himself on a balanced life between entrepreneurial ventures, mountain sport exploration (with a keen focus on backcountry snowboarding and snowmobiling) and a deep connection with his family, colleagues and friends abroad. While Nater's personal entrepreneurial attention is devoted to D8a Driven, he also invests, advises and takes seriously his role in inspiring self-confidence in other entrepreneurs. Topics & Timestamps: 0:00 Episode introduction 2:12 Nater Youngchild's background story 8:30 Entrepreneurial journey 16:16 Working with a co-founder 20:01 Hustle culture 30:41 Amazon agency and data 36:58 Transition from agency to building SaaS ✨ D8a Driven is making its ML-based recommendations for Amazon optimizations available for integration into project management software like Monday.com and Asana. We would love for people to tell us which project management software they use for their Amazon business so we can be sure to integrate with the tools they use. ✨ Listeners of the podcast can book time directly with Nater to learn more about D8a Driven and you will get a 20% discount. Just mention the podcast! Connect with Nater: https://www.d8adriven.com/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nateryoungchild/ https://calendly.com/nateryoungchild/ ✨ Download our FREE Financial Planning Template for Amazon Sellers: https://bit.ly/free-amazon-financial-template ✨ Connect with us on social media: Yoni on LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/in/yonkoz/ Successful Scales on LinkedIn - https://linkedin.com/company/successful-scales/ Instagram - https://instagram.com/successfulscales Facebook - https://facebook.com/successfulscales ✨ More about us: MultiplyMii Staffing - https://multiplymii.com Escala Consulting - https://weareescala.com Successful Scales Podcast - https://successfulscales.com ✨ Full video episodes are also uploaded on YouTube: Subscribe here: https://lnkd.in/gAuEXjS Successful Scales is sponsored by Global Wired Advisors - a leading digital investment bank with decades of merger and acquisition experience on online and e-commerce businesses and focused on optimizing the business sale process to increase the transactional value of your greatest asset Connect with Global Wired Advisors here - https://globalwiredadvisors.com/ Resources: Green Lights by Matthew McConaughey The 5-Minute Journal

As consumers deal with rising interest rates, persistent inflation, and a desire to get outside in the ever changing COVID environment, the question is, what does this all mean for the future of eCommerce growth?-----Transcript-----Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Andrew Rubin, Morgan Stanley's Latin America Retail and eCommerce Analyst. Along with my colleagues bringing you a variety of perspectives, I'll be talking about the outlook for global e-commerce in the years ahead. It's Thursday, May 12th, at 2 p.m. in New York. Amid rising interest rates and persistent inflation, we've seen quite a lot of debate about the health of the consumer and the effect on eCommerce. If you couple those factors with consumers' desire to return to in-person experiences as COVID recedes, you can see why we've fielded a lot of questions about what this all means for eCommerce growth. To answer this question, Morgan Stanley's Internet, eCommerce and Retail teams around the world drew on both regional and company level data to fashion what we call, the Morgan Stanley Global eCommerce Model. And what we found was that the forward looking picture may be more robust than some might think. While stay at home trends from COVID certainly drove outsized eCommerce growth from 2019 to 2021, we found the trend should stay stronger for longer, with eCommerce set to grow from $3.3 trillion currently to $5.4 trillion in 2026, a compound annual growth rate of 10%. And there are a few reasons for that. First, the shift toward online retail had already been in place well before the COVID acceleration. To put some numbers behind that, eCommerce volumes represented 21% of overall retail sales globally in 2021. That's excluding autos, restaurants and services. So, while the rise of eCommerce during the first year of COVID in 2020 is easily explained, the fact that growth persisted in 2021, even on a historically difficult comparison, is evidence, in our view, of real behavioral shift to shopping online. Another factor that supports our multi year growth thesis is a trend of broad based eCommerce gains, even for the highest penetration countries and categories. As you might expect, China and the U.S. represent a sizable 64% of global eCommerce volumes, and these countries are the top drivers of our consolidated market estimates. But we see higher growth rates for lower penetrated regions, such as Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa, as well as categories like grocery and personal care. Interestingly, however, in our findings, no country or vertical represented a single outsized growth driver. Looking at South Korea, which is the global leader in e-commerce, we expect an increase from 37% of retail sales in 2021 to 45% in 2026. For the electronics category worldwide, which leads all other major categories with 38% penetration, we forecast penetration reaching 43% in 2026. And while there are some headwinds due to logistics in certain countries and verticals, we believe these barriers will continue to come down. Another encouraging sign is that globally, we have yet to see a ceiling for eCommerce penetration. We identify three fundamental factors that underpin our growth forecasts and combine for what we see as a powerful set of multi-year secular drivers. First, logistics. We see a big push towards shorter delivery times and lower cost or free delivery. The convenience of delivery to the door is a top differentiating factor of eCommerce versus in-store shopping. And faster speeds can unlock new eCommerce categories and purchase occasions. Second, connectivity. Internet usage is shifting to mobile, and smartphones and apps are increasingly the gateway to consumers, particularly in emerging markets. And these consumers, on average, skew younger and over-index for time spent on the mobile internet. And third is Marketplace. We see a continued shift from first party owned inventory to third party marketplace platforms, connecting buyers and sellers. For investors, it's important to note that global eCommerce does not appear to be a winner-take-all market. And this implies opportunity for multiple company level beneficiaries. In particular, investors should look at companies with forecast share gains, exposure to higher growth categories, and discounted trading multiples versus history. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, please share Thoughts on the Market with a friend or colleague, or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps more people find the show.

In today's edition of ecom vault, we show you a business selling eyewear and sunglasses! They advertise well, have great high-quality images, a credible well-built store, and are doing many things that people in the e-commerce dropshipping world can learn from. This is a great business for anybody to model and I would invite all of you to watch this video and implement what you learn.▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ Get The Best Selling Book ‘Ecommerce Empire' For FREE: https://ecommerceempirebuilders.com/book WATCH NOW 7-Figure Ecom Masterclass: http://bit.ly/funnel-class-yt Have Us Build & Launch Your Entire Ecommerce Business: https://bit.ly/BuildMyFunnel-YT FREE Empire Builder Bonuses: https://youtu.be/QknqB0dpDKc Sign Up For StoreFunnels (Website+Funnel Builder): https://www.storefunnels.net▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Meghla Bhardwaj is the Co-Founder of India Sourcing Network. She has over 20 years of experience in the Asia sourcing industry. She is passionate about helping global Amazon and eCommerce sellers discover unique products to source from India. She has been interviewed on over a hundred podcasts and webinars about the benefits of importing made-in-India products. She is the Co-Founder of India Sourcing Network, a first-of-its-kind platform that provides importers everything they need to build private label brands sourcing from India. Meghla also runs The Asian Seller, a community for e-commerce sellers in Asia to help them start and grow their businesses. https://indiasourcing.net Make sure to subscribe to the podcast so that you are notified of new episodes!